George Romero: The Monsters Within

Night of the Living Dead (Directed by George Romero)

Director George Romero had a remarkable start with his first feature, Night of the Living Dead (1968). With a cast of Pittsburgh unknowns and a budget of under $70,000, it went on to become a horror cult classic, grossing more than $10 million and establishing Romero as a master of the genre. 

Romero followed Night with It's Always Vanilla (1970) and Jack's Wife (1971), two films that were not widely released and now largely overlooked. Romero remained in Pittsburgh, concerned about being stereotyped as a horror filmmaker. Despite this, he continued to work, producing advertisements and sports specials for television. His next feature The Crazies has always been overshadowed by his zombie films, yet this pandemic thriller is possibly Romero's most daring investigation of his central theme: the breakdown of social order. 

The film's unsettling concept must have had a resonance in the crisis-ridden early 1970s. A military jet crashes in western Pennsylvania, unleashing an unknown virus into the water supply and rendering the locals violent. The administration moves into denial mode, contemplating unleashing a bomb on the afflicted town. The virus was being researched as a biological weapon. Soldiers in hazmat suits and gas masks storm the scene, and gun-toting residents quickly retaliate.

The basic paranoid theme of "The Crazies," which recurs in the cycle of plague films, can be traced back to Don Siegel's 1956 sci-fi classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers": How can you know if someone is infected? Also, how can you avoid becoming infected? 

The action switches between a scientist (Richard France) working on an antidote and a ragged band of holdouts lead by a firefighter (W.G. McMillan) and his pregnant girlfriend (Lane Carroll). However, among the survivors, mistrust and terror quickly set in. 

When the calamity is a communicable virus, the feeling of community that often arises in disaster films is significantly undercut. Romero, like in “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), questions the purity of society's most basic unit: the nuclear family. 

Martin (1977), his comeback to the horror genre, garnered critical acclaim, telling the tale of a young man who believes he is a vampire, who moves to a Pennsylvania town to live with his elderly, cousin and try to satisfy his bloodlust.

This was followed by the seminal Dawn of the Dead (1979), in which the undead now roam the whole continent of America, feasting on the flesh of the living. In a desolate retail mall, TV reporter Francine (Gaylen Ross), her boyfriend Stephen (David Emge), and two SWAT team police seek sanctuary. Despite their best attempts, their brief shelter is jeopardised when a group of raiding motorcyclists destroys the barrier, allowing the undead to enter the retail centre.

The following interview for Twilight Zone magazine is from 1981 and was undertaken during the release of Romero’s Knightriders, about modern-day knights who joust on motorcycles.

Night of the Living Dead (Directed by George Romero)

TZ: You’ve been making movies ever since you were young. Were you always interested in horror films?

Romero: I loved all genre films—horror movies as well as war pictures and cowboy films. Whenever one was at a neighborhood theater or on television, I’d watch it. That’s the way I learned how they worked. However, it was just circumstance, the fact that Night of the Living Dead was my first picture, that I got a reputation as a director of horror films. I chose the genre because I liked it, and because I wanted to do something commercial.

TZ: Night of the Living Dead has come to be considered a classic independent film. How did you make it for so little money?

Romero: First of all, it was based on a short story that I wrote. I didn’t have to buy the rights. Then a friend of mine and I collaborated on the screenplay. The production was also very simple. At the time, I had a small film company going. We were doing commercials primarily, but we had all the hardware and a crew of people, and that’s what we used to make the film. Plus we used a lot of friends in the cast—even some of the advertising people we were working with in Pittsburgh. They came out to play the zombies. There was a great deal of local cooperation, because we were the first feature film based out of Pittsburgh.

TZ: Were the actors professional?

Romero: Three or four of them were. But as professional as you can get as an actor in Pittsburgh means doing radio or television. Primarily the cast was friends and people who showed up.

TZ: I’ve heard you were unable to get a major studio to distribute the film. Why do you think you had so much trouble?

Romero: Well, for one thing, I really didn’t know what I was doing. After I made the film, I literally threw it in the trunk of the car and brought it to New York. The first studio I called was Columbia, and I was surprised when they told me to come on in with the film. They held it for three months. They kept saying, “It’s great” and “We’re thinking about it.” But finally they turned it down, because the film was in black and white, and it was hard to get drive-ins to play black and white pictures. The next studio I went to was AIP. They said, “Change the ending, and you’ve got a deal.”

Night of the Living Dead (Directed by George Romero)

TZ: How did they want it changed?

Romero: They didn’t want the hero to die. But I refused to do it. It would have changed what the picture was about. By this time, five months had gone by, and I decided to forget the major studios and get my own sales rep. Finally the Walter Reade-Continental chain made an offer, and I took it.

TZ: Were you surprised when Night of the Living Dead became such a success on the midnight cult circuit?

Romero: Very much—although that was in its second wave. The film was an immediate hit on the drive-in circuit. That’s what a lot of people don’t realize. It made a lot of money right away. In fact, the only money that it ever returned to us was during that first nine months. After that, the film sort of dropped out of existence for about a year and a half. Then Walter Reade released it on a double bill with a film called Slaves. Rex Reed and some of the other critics wrote that it was better than Slaves. Then the Elgin and the Waverly and a couple of other theaters started to play it at midnight. It began to get international press, and that really surprised me. I knew that it was a good horror film, but by this point, all I could see in it were the flaws, the things I wished I could go back and correct.

TZ: Despite your own dissatisfaction, the film’s success was certainly important to your career.
Romero: Yes and no. I was able to raise the money right away to make more movies. But in retrospect, I think it happened too quickly. Though I did have ideas for other films, I had no idea what the business was about. I was just a guy making beer commercials in Pittsburgh.

TZ: I’ve read that you were reluctant to do another horror picture right away, for fear you’d be typed as a horror director.

Romero: That’s true. So what did I do? I went and made two films that probably six people saw—It’s Always Vanilla and Jack’s Wife. I learned a lot from them in terms of developing as a filmmaker, but what they really taught me was the nature of the film business. I learned that the film industry is not going to accept serious little dramas from some upstart in Pittsburgh—especially if the films have no stars. As they say in the biz, there’s no bottom-side protection. Those two films taught me what the odds were against that kind of small personal film. I still don’t think those films are bad, I just think they were the wrong kind of film to make at that stage in my career.

The Crazies (Directed by George Romero)

TZ: Is that why you returned to the horror genre?

Romero: No, because I didn’t—at least not right away. After those two films, I got involved with a small independent New York distributor, Cambist, and I made The Crazies. It’s a disaster film about a bio-weap- ons spill. This film didn’t hit, either, but in this case the problem was not with the film, but with the handling. When the distributor saw the rough cut, he thought he had Jaws on his hands. Consequently he tried to open it too big, and he spent a lot of money just opening in New York. It was a lot of money for him, but it wasn’t enough to compete with the big studios. He ended up having to shelve the film.

TZ: Tell me more about the film itself.

Romero: It was inspired by the science fiction disaster films of the 1950s. It’s about a plane that crashes, spilling a substance designed for germ warfare. Nobody knows exactly what’s going on. People are being affected by the germ, but they don’t know it. All they know is that the army has come into town and is trying to herd them all together. The soldiers are just as confused as the townspeople. There are only a few officials in the Pentagon who know what actually happened, and what results is a conflict between the townspeople and the military forces.

TZ: It sounds very political.

Romero: It is. It was made just around the time of Kent State. You remember how angry people were about the shootings on the campus by the National Guard. Ultimately, I think, the film deals with the politics a little too lightly. It has sort of an outrageous, bawdy style, and some people may have thought we were making fun of politics, exploiting Vietnam and the Kent State tragedy. We weren’t at all. In fact, The Crazies was a very angry and radical film, if one sees through the comic surface.

TZ: Who are the Crazies in the title? The soldiers or the townspeople?

Romero: The people. Once they come in contact with the bug, they go crazy. However, there’s a scientist brought in to handle the situation who observes that you can’t tell who’s crazy and who’s not.

TZ: It sounds to some extent like what happens in Night of the Living Dead, in which the people who are alive get killed and almost immediately turn into zombies.

Romero: That’s because I was dealing with the same idea in both movies—how easily the victim becomes the monster. For instance, in Night of the Living Dead, take those scenes with the little girl. Her mother’s trying to protect her, but then the girl dies, and seconds later she’s a zombie, going after her mother. What I’m trying to show is how the monster, the evil, is not something lurking in the distance, but something actually inside all of us.

That’s what Stephen King shows so well. He takes a real situation, a very mundane situation, and throws it just two degrees out of whack. It’s like Village of the Damned, where those delightful little children are really the evil ones. That’s a very scary thing. It’s like meeting an insane person on the street.

Martin (Directed by George Romero)

TZ: Talking about what constitutes horror, the next big feature you did was Martin. I remember the Newsweek review, which said, “Romero poses the question of whether the hero, Martin, is in fact an eighty-four- year-old vampire from Transylvania or an eighteen-year-old psychotic from Pittsburgh.” Is that how you saw the movie?

Romero: In a way. Martin is designed to show that all those supernatural monsters that are part of our literary tradition are, in essence, expurgations of ourselves. They are beasts we’ve created in order to exorcise the monster from within us. Whether it’s a monster made out of spare parts, one that grows out of us, or something we turn into during a full moon, monsters have traditionally been considered embodiments of our own evil. By distinguishing them from us, we could destroy them. I tried to show in Martin that you can’t just slice off this evil part of ourselves and throw it away. It’s a permanent part of us, and we’d better try to understand it.

TZ: Are you saying that we’re all innately evil?

Romero: “Potentially evil” is a better way of putting it. I don’t think there’s an intrinsically evil side to man. But I think all of us at certain times in our lives do things that are compromising, things that go against our conscience. There’s a line we won’t cross, and for all of us it’s a question of “Where is that line?” Sometimes we stretch it a bit. No matter who we are, and how much we’re satisfied with our own be- havior, there are always those moments we feel guilty about. That’s the guilt we’re trying to unload by creating monsters. We can then punish ourselves by punishing the monster, allowing our good side to prevail. In Martin, by showing an eighteen-year-old psychotic kid who on one hand is himself and on the other hand is this monster, I’m showing that the monster can never die. It’s like in Night of the Living Dead. You can kill the monster, but your next-door neighbor may become him tomorrow.

TZ: In real life, who would you be more afraid to run into on a dark Pittsburgh street—the vampire or the young psychotic?

Romero: Probably the psychotic, because he looks normal, but a second later he could change. That’s precisely the point I’m trying to make. Traditionally, whenever we see vampires in the movies, we’ve come to expect a certain predictable behavior. For example, we all know that vampires are only going to frighten us at night, and that to get rid of them, all we have to do is find their casket and put a stake through their heart. What I’m trying to show in Martin is that we can’t expect the monster to be predictable. That’s also what Steve’s saying in his books.

Martin (Directed by George Romero)

TZ: One of the things I found most interesting about Martin, and which lends itself to what you’re saying, is the fact that he uses razors against his victims, rather than fangs. I think that makes him much more horrifying.

Romero: Visually it’s certainly more horrifying. It also makes him more mysterious. Fangs don’t come out just when he feels the need, and the need is not connected to the moon or the night. However, on the other hand, Martin’s got a very detailed and meticulous M.O. He uses syringes and razor blades. He has a little kit with breaking and entering tools, and he knows about things like burglar alarms, and electric garage-door openers, which is one of those supposedly fail-safe devices, but which he uses to get into the one house he attacks. That’s another level of Martin. It’s saying that the very things we take comfort in and feel safe because we have, like garage-door openers, are in fact not going to save us.

TZ: In the case of Martin, did you have the different levels of the film thought out in advance, or did they just develop?

Romero: I planned it all in advance. I always do that. It’s a self-preservation technique. Knowing what this business is like, I don’t like to sit down and do a final script and get all excited and emotionally involved with it until I know for sure there’s a deal. And thanks to the talents of my partner, I’ve been in the luxurious position of making all of our deals on the basis of treatments and story ideas. Consequently, all of the films I’ve made come from ideas that I’ve had for a year or more. I have little index files with story-line ideas, and I work on them a lot. But it’s not until I know the film’s definitely going to be made that I actually sit down and write the final script. I think it’s important to be in touch with the story at the time you’re doing it. I would hate to take out one of my old scripts that’s been sitting in the drawer and film it without being able to rework it.

TZ: As a novelist, I know that when you’re in the process of writing scenes that are particularly horrifying, they can sometimes have a chilling effect. Does the same thing happen to you as a director? Or because it’s a group enterprise, with so many people around, does that diminish the thrill?

Romero: It happens when you’re cutting the film. It’s four in the morning, you’re all alone working on a scene, and you finish it, shut off the lights, and play it for yourself. Those are the times one of your own scenes may frighten you. It’s happened to me three or four times. It happened with Night of the Living Dead, with a couple of scenes in Martin, and with the knitting needle scene in The Crazies. It’s a scene with a little old lady—again, it’s one of those things that are two degrees off-whack. She’s sitting in a rocking chair, knitting. A soldier walks in to take her to safety, and she lays into him with her knitting needle. That scene really got to me the first time I saw it.

Martin (Directed by George Romero)

TZ: What about when you rescreen one of your movies? Does it still have an effect on you, or have you seen it too often?

Romero: I make a habit of laying off my films for long periods of time, and then taking a fresh look. After it was first made, I laid off Night of the Living Dead for three years. Even when I would be speaking about it somewhere, I wouldn’t sit in while it was being shown. That’s because all I could see were the problems. Right now, I haven’t seen the film for four years.

Even when you’re making the film, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether it’s working. In that respect, filmmaking is different from writing. I know that when I write a script, I can lay off it for a few days and then go back and get a sense of how it’s reading. A film is different when you’re working on it, because you see it over and over. You see how the images cut against each other, and you know exactly what’s coming. You really need time away from it before you can let it affect your senses with any degree of freshness.

The impact of film is basically visceral—and that’s particularly so, with horror, as well as comedy. Whenever you’re trying to evoke a spontaneous reaction, like a laugh, a cry, or a startle, it’s a very delicate process. You don’t know if it’s working, because you yourself never get to experience it for the first time. It’s really instrument flying. You’re banking on understanding intellectually that if you connect this sound with this image, then you’ll get a rise out of the audience.

TZ: But you don’t really know until you show it to people?

Romero: That’s right. And sometimes it’s a very rude awakening. The first time you have it is in front of forty people. If everyone sits there and the suspense or horror doesn’t hit them, you know it’s not work- ing. You can just feel it.

TZ: Do you make a point of seeing the films of other horror directors? Romero: Sure. I go to see everyone else’s work. I like John Carpenter a lot. He’s really very skilled at frightening you, and I think Halloween is beautiful. I also think David Cronenberg does a good job. I like both The Brood and Scanners. Another favorite director of mine is Roman Polanski. I thought Repulsion was incredible, especially the scene with the mirror. Catherine Deneuve opens a door that has a mirror on it, and as the door is moving, there’s maybe a frame or two where you see, in the mirror, a figure standing behind her. There’s not even a sound, but it’s a real heart-stopper. The film itself is beautifully crafted. It tightens all your nerve endings and makes you ready for something horrifying.

Alien did that, too. Alien is an example of how a film can create tension regardless of its story. If you really think about it, we’ve seen that kind of plot, before. What gives the film its tension is the sight of those empty halls, plus the steam and the noise, all of which has a very visceral impact. It wasn’t the jumps that were particularly effective.

TZ: What do you mean by jumps?

Romero: Jumps are when you manipulate the audience into literally jumping in their seats. Anybody can do them. You can make an audience jump with ninety minutes of black leader in which, at random intervals, you’ve put a white frame synchronized with a loud noise. That’ll make them jump. Of course, it’s not the same thing as really putting the audience on edge and holding them there.

– Revealing the Monsters within Us by Tom Seligson/1981. From Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, August 1981, 12–17. 

Martin Scorsese: Violence and Sin

Mean Streets (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

‘You don’t make up for your sins in church – you do it in the streets.’


Inspired by Scorsese’s own experiences of growing up in Little Italy around small-time mobsters and young hoods, Mean Streets tells the story of Charlie (Harvey Keitel), a young debt collector for his gangster uncle. His ambitions to rise in the family business are hampered by his friendship with the self-destructive Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro), and his relationship with his cousin Teresa (Amy Robinson) who rejects his background of Catholic guilt and street machismo. 

Less a crime film than a character study and homage to the streets of New York’s Little Italy, Mean Streets is not strictly autobiographical but in Scorsese’s words, ‘was an attempt to put myself and my old friends on the screen, to show how we lived, what life was like in Little Italy. It was really an anthropological or a sociological tract.’ 

After his feature debut with Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967) – originally a film-school project inspired by John Cassavetes’ Shadows – Scorsese found work in Hollywood as an editor before being hired by Roger Corman to direct Boxcar Bertha (1972), a low budget genre picture set during the American depression. 

Corman then offered Scorsese another low-budget exploitation project when Scorsese’s mentor John Cassavetes urged the young director to make something more personal instead. Scorsese mentioned a script he was working on titled Season of the Witch, a sequel to Who’s That Knocking at My Door, that needed a rewrite. 

The script developed into Mean Streets and was eventually filmed in 27 days mostly in Los Angeles, where it was easier to get permits and shoot with a non-unionized crew.  Energetic, inventive and deeply personal, it is the first recognisably mature Martin Scorsese film. It opened to critical acclaim and established the careers of De Niro and Keitel and brought Scorsese to the attention of Hollywood.

In the following extract from his book Conversations with Scorsese, Richard Schickel discusses with Scorsese the events behind the making of Mean Streets: 

RS: I have to tell you: Of all your movies Mean Streets remains the hardest one for me to come to grips with.

      

MS: It’s an aggressive film. I didn’t think anybody was really going to see the film. Jonathan Taplin produced it. A young man named E. Lee Perry gave us the money, and I just thought it was going to be a film that ultimately might be on a shelf. But we thought it was a pretty accurate portrayal of that way of life—not on the upper levels, like The Godfather, but on the street level, what I knew and how I lived.

But it’s tough: People would get up in the middle, saying of it, ‘Please stop the screening.’ And walk out. ‘I hate pictures like this,’ they would say.

RS: Harvey, on the one hand, seems to want to be with these tough guys, he wants to be as tough as they are. He is as tough as they are, in a way. At the same time, he’s always going back to the church—there are those wonderful shots of him in the church. And the church is so beautiful and, as you said before, peaceful. It seems to me he’s projecting the conflict you felt.

      

MS: After about six years of working on the script and story, that’s what I channeled into it.  I had three different groups of friends. One group went to Fordham, and are now lawyers and bank presidents—good guys who made good lives for themselves. I had another friend who was more the intellectual of the group, and a loner, and I’d go with him to see Broadway plays. And then I had another couple of guys who were more street toughs. I was split among the three. When I went to NYU, in 1960, when I walked six blocks down Houston Street, it was like going to Mars. I had seen movies like Twelve Angry Men, showing the American process, and I was living with people who were not part of that.

People complain about my depiction of Italian Americans. But I can’t help them with that. I’m sorry. It’s just that it’s my perception of what I know. There are guys, as I say, who are upstanding members of the community. They’re doing fine. There are guys who are out of town, who can’t come back. There are guys who are dead. I was in the middle of it. In a way, I was trying to understand how one should behave in life. What is the moral code? What is right, and what’s wrong?

      

RS: Harvey’s character has a little bit of you and a little bit of your father in him, doesn’t he?

      

MS: Well, Harvey’s character is named after my father, Charlie, who is trying to live morally in a world that’s not moral, in a world that’s primal. But there are two things going on. There’s his relationship with his uncle, in which he can be elevated to a certain extent in that community. And I had him going to college at the same time, though he doesn’t have enough in him yet to utilize the American opportunity education provides to get the hell out of there. But he can, because he is generally a decent guy, work with his uncle and make a good living, and have a sense of dignity in that world.

He’s not a street tough. I mean, he hangs with them. But he tries to bring reason to all of this. And, ultimately, because of his relationship with Johnny and his girlfriend, Teresa [who is an epileptic], his chances are destroyed completely. He should have been killed, because he has nowhere to go. There’s no way his uncle could work with him now.

He’s messed up because he has this sense of love for the both of them. And he has to leave town and go to Texas or Florida or somewhere.

His love for the both of them, for Johnny and Teresa, is interesting, because for me it has religious implications, in that, for whatever reasons, this guy is just filled with guilt. Why he’s filled with guilt, that’s something else. There’s a kind of deep curiosity in him. He’s not part of a world in which he can go off into the desert, let’s say, and be a monk and a hermit: he’s got to deal in a rough world, a primitive world, a savage world. Can you still be a good person? Can good still happen? I know there’s no justice, but can it be worked out? And so that, along with his own feelings about leading a spiritual life, he calls down upon himself a kind of suffering.

RS: Is that what the girl represents—loss as a form of...

      

MS: To a certain extent. But mainly it’s Johnny. Because he says in the bar, Here comes my penance. Ultimately, I think Johnny senses something. Because at the end of the picture he says to Harvey, You’re doing it for you, not for me. So that you can feel better spiritually.

But he’s caught. He’s caught. In that world, they’re not dealing on the spiritual level. It’s fate. He has transgressed, and he’s going to have to pay for it.

      

RS: I don’t understand why the uncle is so dead set against the girl, who’s perfectly nice—

      

MS: She wants to move out. She wants to move out of the neighborhood. She’s different. She’s a troublemaker. She threatens the value of the family: to stay together and support each other.

RS: Let’s talk about De Niro. He comes on—

      

MS: —and he just inhabits the role.

      

RS: It is certainly the beginning of the Jake LaMotta...

      

MS: Yeah, it is. It’s the same picture, really.

      

RS: The main thing, I think, is that Johnny has no sense of consequence. He has no sense of being able to look ahead.

      

MS: Why should he look ahead? He’s got no place to go. He doesn’t have the education. He doesn’t have the temperament. And he acts out against these people, knowing to a certain extent that his youth will help him. He is all anarchy at that point.

He says, You want to stick with me, you’re coming down with me. It’s not just about how much you love me, and how much you want to take care of me. There’s a lot going on with you. You don’t even know what the hell you want out of life, he tells Harvey, in effect.

I thought what was going on between Harvey and Bob was great in those three and a half weeks of shooting. They understood that, ultimately, the relationship is based on loving each other, but that one was getting more out of it than the other. It was something that, in Charlie’s mind, was a more spiritual thing. But they’re all of them damned at the end. None of them die, which is worse, because they might as well die. The worst thing that could be—and it happens to all the characters at the end of Mean Streets—is that they wind up humiliated, not killed. Humiliated.

And so it was very real. In Mean Streets, the shooting in the car at the end was based on something I experienced. I was at NYU when it happened. I got out of a car with a friend of mine only a half hour before a shooting like that occurred. On the weekends I’d hang out with my friends—at after-​hours clubs, the backs of tenements, that sort of stuff. This kid had a car, and he was going around for a ride. He was a part-​time cop, had a gun. And so we went with him in the car a few times.

And then on Elizabeth Street one night at about two in the morning, we realized he was acting with bravado, in a way that we pulled back from. So we told him we were going to go home. So, all right, he drops us off. On Elizabeth Street you had cars parked on both sides. And he’s driving down the block. And there’s a red light, and there’s a car in front of him. And the red light changes to green, and the car doesn’t move. A guy comes over and starts talking with the driver in the first car. Our friend blows his horn. The car in front of him doesn’t move. The guys are talking. He blows his horn again. The guys continue talking. He gets out, walks up to them, he takes his gun out or his badge. He says, ‘I’m a cop. Move this car.’ The guy says, ‘All right.’ He moves the car.

The next morning, we heard our guy was driving on Astor Place. He looked over at a car next to him and the people in that car started firing shots into his car. There was another kid in the car who got shot in the eye. And it was because he talked to the wrong people the wrong way.

And that became something that was very important to me and my friend, who had left the car an hour or two earlier. Because we could have been killed. Mean Streets had to be made because I was in the car that night. I went backwards from that. How the hell did he get into a situation like that? We didn’t even know the guys. And I said to myself, That’s the story to tell.

It made you stop and think—the kind of world we’re in, the society we’re in. So, anyway, that was a major moment in my life, and that’s what Mean Streets comes out of. And it has to explode like that. I’ve seen it happen, a lot of times. It’s just the way things work. So that’s why the chaos is there. I was almost a victim of it. Another friend of mine was killed, taken out because he was a wild cannon. But by that point, I was moving to California, you know.

You get a touch of that sort of thing in Goodfellas—the poor kid who gets shot first in the foot and then in the chest. When the kid is shot in the foot, why the hell does he come back the next week? Why? Because he has no place to go. Can’t get on a plane. He doesn’t know anybody. He doesn’t have the education. And it was just one of those things. He came back. He came back and he said one word too many. You know? And that was it. It happens.

       

RS: One other thing: Right here at the beginning of your career the violence seems to me so characteristic of what we’d see later. It just occurs. There’s not a lot of motivation. It almost comes out of nowhere.

      

MS: Well, that’s the way it was. That’s the world I was in. The violence is always in the background. I’d go into a place, even in a movie theater, I always had my antennae out all the way, because I had to watch if somebody said something wrong to somebody else. Some complain that the films denigrate Italian Americans. But I’m just telling it from my perspective. That doesn’t mean that other friends of mine see it that way. But my experience is that there are certain groups of people who are aligned with certain families. I didn’t know they were called families at the time, but there were certain people with power, and if somebody hits somebody, or does something, not just on the street level, not just kids, the settling up is done, usually, in the old way, between the different groups. Lives were run that way. It’s a very tough way of living.

RS: Is that violence explicable if you really, really connect it to the Mob? And it’s only to somebody like me that the violence seems almost totally inexplicable?

      

MS: I don’t want to seem to contradict what I said before. But, no, at least in this world, it’s always explicable. People criticized the film for pointless violence. I said, No, there’s no such thing as pointless violence. It comes from something. In that world we have to be very careful as to who insulted whom, who brushed by another, who said something a little in a nasty way. In Goodfellas, where Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta are playing a game, and joking around, and all of a sudden Pesci is saying, Why do you say I’m funny? Well, says Ray, because you tell a funny story. Do you think I’m a clown? No, I didn’t say you’re a clown. What did you mean then? And somebody starts to speak—No, he’s a big boy, he can talk for himself. And it changes on a dime. You could be killed. You could get into a fight, not be killed, but get beaten up pretty badly if you didn’t know how to handle yourself.

I mean, there was always tension. None of this business of the happy immigrants jumping and dancing and doing tarantellas. It’s Los Olvidados. It’s Journey to the End of the Night by Céline. That is the closest of anything I ever read to the reality of the people in those Lower East Side buildings.

    

RS: So all of that fed into Mean Streets?

      

MS: Mean Streets was based on myself and a couple of friends I had, but particularly two guys. One of them thinks the Johnny Boy character is really about him, and in a way it was, but not fully. He no longer lives in New York, but he always felt angry about that.

After my father died, I realized what the hell the picture really was about: my father and that brother of his who we’ve talked about; a lot of money that was owed, a lot of sit-​downs. Every night I’d hear the drama. For twenty, twenty-​five years, that’s all I heard. About what’s right and wrong and you’re in a jungle. It had to do with the dignity of the name, and respect—walking a tightrope of respect, not being a wiseguy. Mean Streets was about him and my uncle, but I couldn’t verbalize it until after ’93 or ’94, when it really hit home.

- Extracted from ‘Richard Schickel: Conversations with Scorsese’ Alfred Knopf, New York, 2011.  

An Actor’s Revenge and a Director’s Triumph

An Actor’s Revenge (Directed by Kon Ichikawa)

Kon Ichikawa is likely the least recognised and the least well understood among Japanese filmmakers who garner worldwide respect. The first of his pictures to gain worldwide distribution was The Burmese Harp (1956), which depicted the colourful native music of Burma. In 1959, Fires on the Plain, a moving World War II drama, also took advantage of this new distribution outlet. Other titles with international distribution in the 1960s were The Key (1959), Alone on the Pacific (1962), and An Actor's Revenge (1963). 

While Ichikawa's films lack the evident integrity of Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa, on the surface, their sheer diversity reveals an underlying unity. Although everyone recognises Ichikawa's technical prowess, he has had to labour under more difficult circumstances than the other masters of Japanese film. Several projects (including one of his most renowned, An Actor's Revenge) were placed on him by the studio as a punishment for the financial failure of his more personal efforts. However, he was able to imprint his own personality on many works. Ichikawa categorised his films into "bright" and "dark". 

However, as most critics have emphasised his diversity, it is worth noting those aspects of Ichikawa's filmmaking that appear over again. His visual style was influenced by his early interests in painting and animation training. Ichikawa's use of manga-like storyboards, his preference for site work over studio shoots, and his own creation of sets, as well as his talents in makeup artistry, composing soundtracks, and cinematography. The approach to absolute control is similar to that of the cartoonist, and he made his debut in the cinema industry in 1933 as an assistant animator. One may see the influence of cartoons and painting in his career in the artificial staging used in such films as Ten Dark Women (1961) and An Actor's Revenge, where the style of film noir is heightened to mimic manga.

An Actor’s Revenge is set in the rarified realm of nineteenth-century kabuki theatre and chronicles a female impersonator's quest to revenge his parents' murders at the hands of a trio of unscrupulous men. Ichikawa subverts melodramatic norms, bringing the hero's wounded psyche to life in startling widescreen arrangements saturated with vivid colour, pop-art inspirations, and painstaking choreography. Anchored by a beautifully androgynous performance by Kazuo Hasegawa repeating a part he portrayed on-screen three decades previously, An Actor's Revenge is a stunning investigation of how art's illusions collide with reality. 

When we encounter Yukinojo for the first time, his group has travelled from Osaka to perform on the Edo stage. From the balcony, he overhears two of his three intended targets. Later, the emotional actor confides in his mentor, Kikunojo (Chusha Ichikawa), that he wants to develop a relationship with the men and, rather than just disposing of them, wants to torment them until they go insane and suffer like his parents did. 

Hasegawa also plays a secondary part in the film, as a thief who chooses to assist Yukinojo in obtaining his vengeance, a guy who, as one of the characters comments, looks a lot like Yukinojo. 

The film's aesthetic never settles on one genre. There are sequences where Ichikawa frames them securely with lines of windows and doors, yet others, particularly the ones with no set location, seem to live on an eternal stage, surrounded by floating, enveloping darkness or mist. The use of light is bold and very theatrical even in scenarios that take place outside the theatre. Conversations are often observed by an “audience” of observers. 

The flowing, dream-like story is echoed in the delicate portrayal of Hasegawa as Yukinojo, who seems delicate and dreamy when compared to his villainous portrayal as Yamataro, who is earthier and funny. Yukinojo is like the theatre itself; as he fades away at the end of the play, his audience takes away memories of his performance, which lingers in their minds.

By the time Yukinojo's scheme is realised, An Actor's Revenge has devolved into a terrifying examination of a mind falling apart. Though Ichikawa was known for his active dislike of kabuki, the complex layers of actor and audience relations call attention to their role in both film and theatre. An Actor’s Revenge is more experimental than anything Ichikawa had created before and is attempting much more than a straightforward vengeance story. Rather, An Actor's Revenge is a contemplative look at destiny and the numerous masks we wear in order to get what we want, even if it is something genuinely dreadful.

In the following essay, Michael Sragow elaborates on the role of theatre and performance, in Ichikawa’s film.

An Actor’s Revenge, the English name given to the 1963 Japanese film Yukinojo henge (Yukinojo the Phantom), is the perfect title for a killer blend of cinema and theater. The director, Kon Ichikawa, transforms a standard period revenge plot, rooted in the cross-dressing kabuki theater of the 1830s, into a hypnotic prism that generates fresh colors as he holds each facet to the light. The palette of the film is psychedelic: the opening performance explodes in red, pink, gold, white, and purple. The kabuki proscenium, letterboxed against the darkness, looks wider than widescreen—it’s an incandescent ribbon that tests the limits of the frame. And in Ichikawa’s hands, even the shape of the screen seems changeable. He breaks up the space with exhilarating audacity, whether by adopting an artful version of picture-in-picture or literally spotlighting his characters (in the theater or in the street) or dissolving boundaries so that a snow-blanketed stage stretches out in all directions like a vast Arctic landscape. The story runs the gamut from farce, soap opera, and action-packed chanbara all the way to heart-crushing tragicomedy. The supporting characters cover the emotional spectrum. They can be satirically rapacious and grotesque yet still transfix us with their pathos and terror.

If any movie requires a protean protagonist to pull everything together, it’s this one. Yukinojo (Kazuo Hasegawa) fits the bill. Orphaned at age seven, trained as an onnagata (a male performer of female roles), and schooled in martial arts, Yukinojo has become a star whose soft face and physique belie his physical strength and steel will. His experience and expertise do more than make him a top performer; they also put him in a position to observe Japanese culture and society, high and low, with ruthless, flexible objectivity. As Yukinojo plots vengeance against the three powerful, greedy men who drove his mother and father to suicide, he analyzes their ambitions and sets them at loggerheads. Being an actor and thus déclassé, close to “the people,” he knows how dangerous it is for big shots to wheel and deal in basic commodities like rice as the masses face famine in the turbulent Tenpo era, beset by droughts, fires, and floods. Warehouses become targets for hungry mobs. This movie is an aesthete’s delight that’s also socially aware. As a pickpocket at the theater remarks in one scene, “People spend more when times are hard.”

The film’s cinematic reach stems from the peerless range of Ichikawa, who continues to defy critical categorization a decade after his death in 2008. He made An Actor’s Revenge during his peak period, which began with the antiwar fable The Burmese Harp (1956) and ended with the epic documentary Tokyo Olympiad (1965). Studio executives at Daiei intended to punish the director for his costly techniques on Conflagration (1958), Bonchi (1960), and The Outcast (1962) by saddling him with this assignment. After all, it was a remake of a trilogy made by Teinosuke Kinugasa (1953’s Gate of Hell) between 1934 and ’36; it even showcases the same star, Hasegawa, ostensibly in his three hundredth production. Ichikawa, though, made this old chestnut of a tale bloom. With the help of his preferred screenwriter—his wife, Natto Wada—Ichikawa made the project an excuse to go all-in creatively, with a whirling narrative and eye-popping beauty. His virtuoso moviemaking melds stage magic and the uncanny while exploring psychological and gender role-playing in a time of chaos.

Ichikawa and Wada’s storytelling has an ultramodern briskness and edge. As the main attraction of the kabuki company, Yukinojo, born in Nagasaki and raised in Osaka, conquers Edo (later renamed Tokyo) on the troupe’s first appearance in the capital city. The movie begins on opening night, which draws two of the bad guys to the box seats: Kawaguchiya (Saburo Date), an ex-clerk, now an ambitious trader; and Sansai Dobe (Ganjiro Nakamura, who had recently starred in Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds and The End of Summer), formerly a Nagasaki magistrate, now a member of the shogun’s retinue. (The shogun, Japan’s military ruler, controlled the country’s entire feudal structure and government, up to and including the mikado, or emperor.) Dobe’s daughter, Lady Namiji, the shogun’s favorite concubine—played by Ayako Wakao, who had appeared in Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1956 swan song Street of Shame and alongside Nakamura a few years later in Floating Weeds—also attends the show, and instantly falls for Yukinojo’s peculiar masculine-feminine charms. None of them knows Yukinojo’s true identity. Since the onnagata wears women’s clothes and subtle makeup even during his downtime, it’s unlikely that the men will recognize him as the boy they orphaned back in Nagasaki. Yukinojo, on the other hand, knows all about them, as well as the third villain, Hiromiya (Eijiro Yanagi), a rich merchant. Ichikawa reduces the rest of the first-night audience to a blur, then outlines Dobe, Kawaguchiya, and Namiji in the actor’s vision like a group portrait in a rearview mirror. Yukinojo confides in voice-over that he will use Namiji to sunder and destroy Hiromiya and the other two.

Yukinojo’s enemies consider theater people amoral members of the demimonde. Still, it’s a staggering insult when Kawaguchiya offers Yukinojo lifelong protection in exchange for his amorous services. Namiji’s father, Dobe, invites Yukinojo to their home, hoping that she’ll tire of him after one or two visits. All the while, Kawaguchiya bets that if he can put Namiji in his debt by setting up a long-term affair between her and the actor, he can use Namiji’s sway with the shogun to expand his own wealth and prestige. As he leads the way to her room, he thinks he’s the one toying with Yukinojo.

But Yukinojo himself has determined to exploit Namiji’s crush and snake his way into Dobe’s household. Again and again, Yukinojo takes advantage of anyone who underestimates him. Extreme weather has produced catastrophic famines, generating riots against rice merchants who hoard their stores. Realizing that Kawaguchiya has tried to corner the market in rice, Yukinojo advises his third target, Hiromiya, to bring his stash of the grain into the city and unload it. When the unholy trio are weakened and at one another’s throats, Yukinojo pulls off two primal performances: impersonating his dead father for Kawaguchiya, and recreating his mother’s suicide for Dobe, thus shattering his antagonists’ confidence and sanity. Here, the director’s careful preparation and expressionistic masterstrokes of lighting, staging, and composition—for instance, the shadow Yukinojo casts as he plays the part of his mother possesses a life, and death, of its own—take us into a phantom zone as eerie as anything in Shakespeare, Tarkovsky, or the Superman franchise.

What Yukinojo brings down on his foes really is an actor’s revenge, dizzyingly dramatic in its form, surgically perceptive in its manipulation of movers and shakers too vain to recognize their own weaknesses. And Ichikawa’s giddy, experimental movie is itself an auteur’s revenge on his studio, because he treats the timeworn material as an opportunity rather than a punishment. Until the tragic drama of its climax, the movie remains inventive, amusing, antisentimental, and playfully meta about almost everything and everyone, including the downtrodden and even the hero himself. Yukinojo inspires passionate debate among theatergoers who buy cheap tickets for standing room (the equivalent of “the gods” as seen in Children of Paradise or the balcony in The Red Shoes). An Actor’s Revenge doesn’t idealize the popular audience, or the dirt-poor, either. It’s frightening to see desperate men riot for rice; they recall the cutthroat gangs in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, released just a couple of years earlier. Thugs lurk in the film’s plentiful shadows and around each corner of its stylized sets. Yukinojo shocks even himself with his cold-bloodedness. He doesn’t strike immediately: he waits for the moments that will produce maximum emotional torture. He takes actions that result in the death of an innocent woman who genuinely loves him.

Hasegawa’s performance is extraordinary from beginning to end. Yukinojo’s onstage postures and gestures, generally soft and elegant, are sometimes definite and passionate. They’re always expressive, often of two things at once—the emotions he’s acting out and the ones simmering beneath the surface. It’s significant that Hasegawa was in his fifties when he made An Actor’s Revenge. Watching this weathered, stocky man play Yukinojo is a bit like watching the burly Shintaro Katsu play the blind swordsman Zatoichi. His age and bulk humanize a mythic character, putting the focus on Yukinojo’s intensity and powers of suggestion. Ichikawa is so comfortable in the world he has created that he can be irreverent about the time-honored kabuki theater and the tradition of the onnagata. He allows us to laugh at and with the tomboy thief Ohatsu (Fujiko Yamamoto) when she says she finds Yukinojo creepy. But Yukinojo’s art and presence are potent enough to turn skeptics into converts. Hasegawa interprets Yukinojo’s craft as an elevated form of dissembling. In close-ups, we see from his eyes that he has more going on in his head than whatever he’s miming, dancing, or reciting in the moment. Offstage, he wraps himself in his onnagata guise as if in a cloak of privacy. Whenever a former fellow student from martial-arts school, consumed with jealousy, challenges Yukinojo to a duel in the street—something he does repeatedly—Hasegawa snaps into a fierce, magnetic concentration. Ichikawa’s focus on these galvanizing transformations stokes the film as much as do his nonstop innovation and imagistic dazzle.

In the volatile culture of the film’s setting, the ambiguity of Yukinojo’s gender is an asset. His ability to put a man’s muscle behind an onnagata’s demure composure spellbinds the second female lead, Ohatsu. Why wouldn’t it? Most males she sees are either callow youths or vicious bastards. Ironically, Ohatsu plays the reckless seducer with Yukinojo, while Namiji, the courtesan, acts like a blushing ingenue with him. Yukinojo’s sake-drinking sessions with Namiji are so tender they might be called love scenes. Both clad in elegant kimonos in different shades of purple, the two sip from tiny silver cups and embrace cheek to cheek, as the strings on the soundtrack play a bittersweet romantic theme that would suit one of Sirk’s, Minnelli’s, or Hitchcock’s melodramas. (The gleefully eclectic score also includes an amped-up version of traditional kabuki music, and jazzy interludes and staccato riffs for ruminative moments and action scenes.) Yukinojo doesn’t take an aggressive, conventionally masculine role when he woos Namiji. He’s modest, at times coquettish. And Namiji, though sensitive and gentle, is no shrinking violet. Ichikawa cuts away just after they press their bodies together as if ready to make love.

The director establishes their apparent emotional parity but never lets us forget that Yukinojo controls the power dynamic with his secret agenda. As a revenge artist, the actor has chosen the ideal path to annihilating her father: Dobe’s life will be hell without the apple of his eye and his sole source of power at court. But Namiji gets to “Yuki,” as she calls him, and to the audience, too, so we understand why the onnagata must seek some sweeping expiation for fatally exploiting her.

Adding to the movie’s gender-role merry-go-round is the general perception around the city’s underworld that Ohatsu, lovely and handy with a gun or knife, isn’t traditionally “feminine” or sympathetic enough to be a desirable mate. The only guy’s guy who can turn Ohatsu’s head is her fellow cutpurse Yamitaro, who operates like an urban Robin Hood without a band of merry men. As he did decades before, Hasegawa plays Yamitaro as well as Yukinojo, and in this part he exudes a gruff, warm charm. It is comical and touching that Yamitaro is attracted to Yukinojo in ways he finds difficult to explain. At the end, he tells Ohatsu that he may give up banditry and girls and beg to become Yukinojo’s assistant. Ichikawa employs the dual casting wittily. It feels organically funny, not at all self-conscious, when Ohatsu tells Yamitaro that, in profile, he resembles Yukinojo.

Remarkably, Ichikawa’s moviemaking wizardry makes this spinning contraption of a film feel all of a piece. Each shot contains something marvelous—such as Yamitaro effortlessly scaling a wall like a figure from a Cocteau fairy tale (Ichikawa adored Cocteau), or Ohatsu popping out from a black nocturnal forest as a royal-blue horizon line streaks across the screen—or something devastating: say, a corpse hanging from a rope like an unstrung marionette. Of course, the film is more than a collection of flourishes. Ichikawa uses classic and contemporary materials to create his own elastic, personal aesthetic.

The filmmaker is perhaps best known today for the tough-minded nostalgia of his 1983 masterpiece The Makioka Sisters. There, he intimately and lyrically evokes the elegiac side of Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel about the fraying of an old Osaka merchant family as it confronts westernization. An Actor’s Revenge does something fundamentally different. It bristles with modernity while miraculously retaining the nuance of an art form that began in the sixteenth century. The director displays an old-time stage, illuminated, as Tanizaki once wrote, “by the meager light of candles and lanterns.” But that’s just a conceit. All the tools in Ichikawa’s studio contribute to his very 1960s light show. At the same time, he treats his star performer lovingly, like a master portrait artist preserving the illusions of gender.

Tanizaki hated the “vulgarity” of kabuki seen in bright Western stage light. (He favored the refinement and simplicity of Noh theater.) For him, the authentic Japanese sensibility rests on an appreciation of darkness. His book-length essay In Praise of Shadows celebrates, among other things, “the mystery of shadows,” “the secrets of shadows,” “the magic of shadows,” and “delight in shadows.” Yet that’s also the basis of the kaleidoscopic, sometimes “vulgar” beauty of An Actor’s Revenge. Working with breathtaking confidence and freedom, Ichikawa shapes both his interior and exterior action so that it always leaps out of darkness. He stages one fight primarily as the clash and clang of a blade and a dagger at night. Steel glints and slashes through the blackness. In another coup de cinéma, two constables try to lasso Yamitaro, and for a moment they snag one of his wrists (or does he grab the rope?). The lasso disappears into the night as if falling down a bottomless well. Shrouded in murk, the constables proceed, hand by hand, along the taut, tingling cable, only to discover that Yamitaro has tied it to a post. All these episodes work visually and viscerally. Ichikawa choreographs camera and actors for maximum punch.

In the movie’s ultimate poetic irony, a benshi (or narrator) tells us that Yukinojo, “the greatest female lead of his age,” the inspiration of so much life-or-death conflict and passion, fades from memory once he gives up the stage. The final shots depict the actor disappearing into the wild flora of a windswept plain. It’s as if Ichikawa is saying, like Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “Our revels now are ended,” his actors “melted into air, into thin air.” The “gorgeous palaces” and “solemn temples”—the enigmas of sexuality and the moral vanities of justice—“dissolve, / And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, / Leave not a rack behind.” The glory of An Actor’s Revenge is its infinite suggestiveness. Ichikawa, like Shakespeare, transforms a revenge saga about playacting into a profound masquerade about man’s, and woman’s, fate.

– An Actor’s Revenge and a Director’s Triumph. By Michael Sragow

For original article see here

Michelangelo Antonioni: ‘My scripts are not formal screenplays’.

Michelangelo Antonioni: The Eclipse (L’Eclisse)

L'Eclisse is a modern masterpiece. It is the last of Antonioni's trilogy pictures providing an uncompromising critique of life in European postwar bourgeois society. Antonioni finds spectacular surroundings for the film's image of a contemporary wasteland in the Rome stock exchange and the Esposizione Universale di Roma (EUR) housing complex — a tract of parched modernist structures situated amongst mostly vacant lots. 

Antonioni contributes his complete range of graphic design capabilities to L'Eclisse. He meticulously positions his characters amid this iconic image of the postwar urban landscape's stiff, off-putting, but enticing geometry. The film's defining image is a massive mushroom-shaped skyscraper that dominates numerous shots. The picture is saturated with the sensation of atomic dread evoked by the tower, making L'Eclisse the strangest of Antonioni's oeuvre. 

The stunning score by Giovanni Fusco adds to the sense of impending doom. The ideological themes of L'Eclisse extend beyond the broad philosophical meditation on the eclipse of humanity in the modern, post-Hiroshima era that appears to be the more obvious reference of the title, despite the fact that he is rarely regarded as an overtly political filmmaker. 

The film's point of view is mostly that of Vittoria (Monica Vitti), whose reaction to events serve as the audience's anchor. Antonioni represents the remaining traces of human feeling and experience via her fear, surprise, delight, and agony. Piero (Alain Delon) and Riccardo (Francisco Rabal), her two lovers, are obnoxious and egotistical. 

Piero is a young manic-depressive stockbroker who works on the floor of the Rome Borsa, a structure built on the foundations of the Hadrian monument. The frenzied, bankrupt rituals of financial capital are depicted here as a temple built for a man regarded as a deity. The postwar Italian economic "miracle" is intertwined with the history of European colonialism, most memorably represented in Vittoria, a translator recovering from the gloomy end phase of an affair with Riccardo, who won't take no for an answer, on her distracted nightly excursions. 

Riccardo can't comprehend why Vittoria would wish to stop things, therefore their parting is shown with a dreadful stillness. In the lengthy, wordless scene that opens the film, Antonioni demonstrates his remarkable skill in demonstrating how dreadfully uncomfortable such moments can be – due primarily to the male need for affirmation, even in the face of an obvious dead-end, amounting to the wasting away of moments of one's life.

‘It seems to me that L’Eclisse is one of the most interesting films of and about the middle of the last century, when humanity was caught between the promise of modernity and the threat of atomic annihilation. This air of paralysis hangs heavily throughout the film and partly defines the once critical term ‘Antonioniennui’ which was used to describe the psychology of his characters in this cycle of films. And yet in spite of its specific historical backdrop and its self-evident modishness in the early 1960s, the film remains a rich and complex portrait of the modern world that still demands and rewards repeat visits.

It is worth quoting David Sin at length on the film.

‘On the surface L’Eclisse is a love story, with its main character Vittoria (Monica Vitti) ending one affair with the writer Riccardo and moving on to a new relationship with the stock market trader Piero (Alain Delon). The setting is Rome – metropolitan, sophisticated, the subject and setting for Fellini’s La Dolce Vita only a couple of years before. We witness a breakup, a new affair, stock market crash, a car crash.

‘The character types and genre elements are all there, and yet the first striking aspect of the film is the deviation from the classic narrative structure of the modern romantic drama. From the very first frame, it sets out to defy conventional expectations and encourage the audience to create meaning from the film in a different way.

‘There are no conventional story signposts, climactic peaks or moments of emotional resonance. It’s as if Antonioni has designed a classic love triangle story and placed it in a time and place where the usual story drivers simply don’t work. He places the actors like static objects into conventional seeming scenes, but the underlying chemistry is missing its catalyst. Every gesture, every declaration of love between Riccardo and Vittoria, or Vittoria and Piero becomes completely artificial when evacuated of all feeling. In this the director is supported by the beautifully blank faces of Monica Vitti and Alain Delon. It’s hard to imagine two other actors who could be better used in this film.’

The following extract is from an interview by the film critic Bert Cardullo with Antonioni in which the director discusses his approach to filmmaking, his ideas for films, and his attitude toward his work.

BC: Do you do a lot of research before you start shooting a picture?

MA: Yes. If I didn’t do so much research for my films, my work would then be a lie. I must always start from more or less scientifically proven data. The biggest danger and temptation of cinema is the boundless possibility it gives movie directors to lie.

BC: When did you first put your eye behind a camera?

MA: “When” is not so important, but what happened at that moment was. The first time I got behind a camera was in a lunatic asylum. I had decided with a group of friends to do a documentary film on mad people. We positioned the camera, got the lamps ready, and disposed the patients around the room. The insane obeyed us with complete abandon, trying very hard not to make mistakes. I was very moved by their behavior, and things were going fine. Finally, I was able to give the order to turn on the lights. And in one second, the room was flooded with light . . .

I have never seen again, on any actor’s face, such an expression of fear, such total panic. For a very brief moment, the patients remained motionless, as if petrified. That lasted literally only a few seconds, followed by a scene really hard to describe. The men and women started having convulsions, then they screamed and rolled on the floor. In one instant, the room turned into a hellish pit. All the mad people were trying to escape from light as if they had been attacked by some prehistoric monster.

We all stood there, completely stunned. The cameraman didn’t even think to stop the camera. Finally, the doctor shouted, “Stop. Cut off the lights!” Then, when the room was dark and silent again, we saw piles of corpses, slightly shaking as if they were going through their final death throes. I have never forgotten that scene, and it is one of the reasons I keep making films.

BC: Research aside, how mentally prepared are you when you arrive on a set to shoot?

MA: Just as an actor, in my view, must arrive on the set in a state of mental virginity, so, too, must I. I force myself not to overintellectualize, and I force myself never to think the night before of the scene I’ll be shooting the next morning. I have a lot of confusion in my head, a real mess—lots of thoughts, lots of ideas, one of which cancels out the other. That’s why I can’t think about what I’m doing. I just do it.

Once on the set, I always spend a half hour alone to let the mood of the set, as well as its lighting, prevail. Then the actors arrive. I look at them. How are they? How do they seem to feel? I ask for rehearsals— a couple, no more—and then shooting starts. It’s while I’m shooting that everything, so to speak, becomes real. After a shot is finished, I frequently continue to shoot the actors, who don’t know that I am doing this. The aftereffects of an emotional scene, it had occurred to me, might have meaning, too, both for the actor and for the psychological progression of his character. Once shooting really stops, sometimes it takes me fifteen minutes of complete silence and solitude to prepare for the next scene. What I still cannot do, however, is concentrate when I feel the eyes of a complete stranger on me, because a stranger always interests me. I want to ask him questions....

BC: Where do you get your ideas for films?

MA: How can I say it? It’s one of my failings that everything I read or see gives me an idea for a film. Fortunately, I can’t do them all. If I could, maybe they would all be very bad. One thing I can say: Until I edit a film of mine, I have no idea myself what it will be about. And perhaps not even then. Perhaps it will only be the reflection of a mood; perhaps the film will have no plot at all in the conventional sense. I depart from my shooting script constantly, so it’s pointless beforehand to release a synop- sis of the film’s action or to discuss its meaning. In any case, my scripts are not formal screenplays but rather dialogue for the actors and a series of notes to the director—myself. When shooting begins, there is invariably a great degree of change. I may film scenes I had no intention of filming, for example, since things suggest themselves on location, and you improvise. Only in the cutting room, when I take the film and start to put it together—only then do I begin to get an idea of what it is all about.

Usually I write the original stories of my films myself, but I never start out with an idea that afterwards turns into a story. Most of the stories which go through my hands in search of form are simply germs which have been breathed in as from the air. If, when the film is finished, it turns out to be saying something, it has happened a posteriori, and that is natural enough. I am a human being, and I am not lacking in perceptions about the people and affairs of this world. If I make the film in all sincerity, then these perceptions will inevitably reveal themselves. However, it is the story which fascinates me most; the images are the medium through which a story can be understood. To be a lover of form for me means being a lover of substance.

BC: Are you ever satisfied with any of your films?

MA: Sometimes I think L’Eclisse is my best work. Other times I like L’Avventura better. The other day I screened La Notte again and thought it was pretty good. But I don’t think Blow-Up is one of my best pictures, and I don’t know why. I guess I am never really satisfied; I amuse myself by experimenting. Even though my experience is deeper now, and technically I am more mature—everything I have to say comes out fluently— I’m not happy after I complete a film. I’m not even happy while I’m shooting it. Again, I don’t know why. Still, I don’t look back, or at least I try not to. These are the best years because they are the only years. You can’t afford to look back; you have to make the best of the present, whatever it may send your way—and however, finally, you may respond.

– Bert Cardullo, Extract from ‘Interview with Antonioni’, Soundings on Cinema.

Alfred Hitchcock on Cinematic Style

The Lodger (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

The audience's emotions are central to Hitchcock's narrative universe; these feelings are evoked through "gripping situations" which are derived from the film's basic framework, in which language plays a limited role. Hitchcock's use of language is often confined to serving the plot, and he writes the script in partnership with his selected screenwriters. The scriptwriter can use a variety of visual tactics to develop a character:

[...] in particular the use of things. This is one of the ingredients of true cinema. To put things together visually; to tell the story visually; to embody the action in the juxtaposition of images that have their own specific language and emotional impact - that is cinema. [...] Things, then, are as important as actors to the writer. They can richly illustrate character”

This narrative style was a feature of the silent film, going back to the films of D.W. Griffith, and is the era in which Hitchcock learned his craft, but was unfortunately passed over in favour of the theatrical and dialogue with the advent of the sound film. From then on, relying on dialogue became the standard practice. But according to Hitchcock, the experienced screenwriter knows how to make effective use of non-verbal elements: things and objects, in the film, instead of falling "into the uncinematic habit of relying too much on dialogue".

Of course, Hitchcock understood that the modern film cannot simply eliminate the need for dialogue. You cannot shoot a modern motion picture only in pictures. So Hitchcock settles on a compromise: "Therefore the skilled writer will separate the two elements. If it is to be a dialogue scene, then he will make it one. If it is not, then he will make it visual, and he will always rely more on the visual than on dialogue". 

‘The silent pictures were the purest form of cinema’ - Alfred Hitchcock

It is important to remember that Hitchcock began his career in the era of silent movies. His first nine films as director - between 1925 and 1929 - were all silent, and even his first sound film, ‘Blackmail’ (1929), was begun as a silent, and was released in silent and sound versions.

The limitations of the silent form led filmmakers to develop a visual language to enable them to say with images what they could not using dialogue or sound. By the time of the arrival of sound in 1927 (later in Europe) this filmmaking language had become so sophisticated that sound was felt by some to be almost unnecessary. Others - including Hitchcock - felt that the arrival of sound meant that something was lost to cinema. Directors were no longer forced to tell a story using images alone, and cinema's distinctively visual storytelling suffered as a result.

Throughout his career, Hitchcock continued to believe in cinema as a visual medium. For him, dialogue and sound should remain secondary to the image in telling the story. This is not to say that he was completely uninterested in dialogue - he worked with many fine writers, and many of his films have excellent dialogue sequences. But it's true that when we think of Hitchcock we tend to remember images - the shower scene in ‘Psycho’ (1960) or the handcuffed Robert Donat and Madelaine Carroll in ‘The 39 Steps’ (1935) - rather than lines of dialogue.

“When we tell a story in cinema, we should resort to dialogue only when it's impossible to do otherwise. I always try first to tell a story in the cinematic way, through a succession of shots and bits of film in between" 

The limitations of silent cinema meant that directors were forced to be imaginative in using images to convey dialogue and effects. The use of 'intertitles' allowed some dialogue and exposition (setting the scene), but it was generally felt that too many intertitles interfered with the action. After the release of the German director F.W. Murnau's ‘Der Letzte Mann’ (‘The Last Laugh’, Germany, 1924), which used no intertitles at all, many felt that a 'pure' cinema should be able to do away with dialogue altogether, and convey everything with images alone.

Let’s look at one example of how the early Hitchcock uses visuals for emotional effect. Hitchcock’s ‘The Lodger’ (1926) concerns a Jack the Ripper-style serial killer at loose in a fog-bound London. The presence of a mysterious stranger in a lodging home creates suspicions among the occupants. Hitchcock wanted to highlight how the lodger's pacing up and down in his room affects the other inhabitants in the room below in one scene. In a sound film we could just hear the lodger's footsteps while watching the reactions of the other occupants.

Hitchcock came up with an innovative solution. He set up a glass floor and filmed the lodger (Ivor Novello) walking back and forth from below. Hitchcock achieves a more interesting and powerful effect than he could have achieved with sound by superimposing this shot over one of the ceilings - with the swaying chandelier further emphasising the force of the lodger's steps - and intercutting between this image and the reaction of the family below. 

The director's efforts are directed at the impression created on the movie audience. Each shot is a statement made with the intention of eliciting an emotional response, of effecting the audience's state of mind, of feeling. That is, the visual has a direct effect on the emotions. Occasionally, the director wants to just please the eye with his visual presentation; other times, he wants to produce a powerful impression on the audience. Thus, the filmmaker exposes his style via his management of all these narrative options. And style is important. Perhaps the most crucial and unique characteristic of a filmmaker is his or her style. This style is evident in both the topic he/she chooses and the method in which he/she directs it. Significant directors are well-known for their aesthetics. 

And Hitchcock is unmistakably known for his intensely personal style, as François Truffaut put it in the introduction to his famous interview with Hitchcock: “Because he exercises such complete control over all the elements of his films and imprints his personal concepts at each step of the way, Hitchcock has a distinctive style of his own. He is undoubtedly one of the few filmmakers on the horizon today whose screen signature can be identified as soon as the picture begins.”

According to Hitchcock, some filmmakers are more concerned with honing their style and handling of the material than with discovering new subjects. They are primarily concerned with the way in which they deliver their stories – a phrase that accurately describes Hitchcock's cinematic technique. He is a filmmaker of narratives who is interested in conveying stories in his own unique way.

For more on this aspect of Hitchcock see the full article from the BFI Screenonline: ‘Hitchcock’s Style’.

North By Northwest (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

In the following extract from an interview with Hitchcock in 1963, the great director discusses his prioritisation of cinematic style over content.

H: Let me say this to you. I put first and foremost cinematic style before content. Most people, reviewers, you know, they review pictures purely in terms of content. I don’t care what the film is about. I don’t even know who was in that airplane attacking Cary Grant. I don’t care. So long as that audience goes through that emotion! Content is quite secondary to me.

I: Now is this a philosophical viewpoint? ... Or is this something that just happened, like the man who makes cartoons likes to make people laugh?

H: Well, I believe this. I believe we still have in our hands the most powerful instrument, cinema, that’s been known. I know of no other medium where on a given night in Japan, in Germany, in Paris, and in London and in New York, the different audiences of different nationalities can be shocked at the same moment at the same thing on that screen. I don’t know of any other medium. The theater? How far does that get? It never gets to Japan. Well, by God, you go outside of a movie on The Ginza, and you will see a great big head of Hitchcock up there. Because they think so much of the director with oriental eyes! Really! Yes! But this is my point when you say what do I enjoy? I enjoy the fact that we can cause, internationally, audiences to emote. And I think this is our job.

I: As an entertainer? As a creator?

H: As an entertainer. As a creator. What is art? Art is an experience, isn’t it? You know? Now the art of the talking picture, I think, belongs to the theater. You see, the only thing wrong with silent pictures was that sound never came out of the mouths. But unfortunately, the moment sound arrived, all these horrible commercial people rushed to the theater, and borrowed from the theater. And they are still doing it today. I’ve done it myself! They say “Will you make a film of Dial M For Murder?” I say O.K., all right. But I refuse to open it up like they do in the movies. I said it’s nonsense. What do you do? When you take a stage play, I said? What do you call opening it up? The taxi arrives, we have a long shot of the street. The taxi stops at the front door of the apartment house. The characters get out, cross the sidewalk, go into the lobby, get into an elevator, go upstairs, walk along the corridor, open the door, and they go into a room. And there they are, on the stage again. So, you might just as well dispense with all that, and be honest and say it’s a photographed stage play and all we can do is to take the audience out of the orchestra and put them on the stage with players.

Dial M for Murder (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

I: You didn’t do this completely though. In Dial M?

H: Yes, and I’ll tell you why. Because I’ve seen so many stage plays go wrong through opening up, loosening it, when the very essence is the fact that the writer conceived it within a small compass.

I: But you would still treat it cinematically?

H: Within its area. If I can. As much as I can.

I: Do you design each production? Design each film in advance completely? With drawings, and ...

H: Yes, Psycho, yes, to some extent with drawings, but you see Psycho was designed, first of all to lead an audience completely up the garden path. They thought the story was about a girl who stole $40,000. That was deliberate. And suddenly out of the blue, she is stabbed to death. Now, a lot of people complained about the excessive violence. This was purposely done, because as the film then proceeded, I reduced the violence while I was transferring it to the mind of the audience. By that first impact, so the design of the film was very clearly laid out. So that that audience, by the time we got toward the end when the girl was going over the house, wandering, they didn't particularly care who she was ... They will yell LOOK OUT! when a burglar is going around the house. They will still have the same fear of being caught or being attacked or what have you. So, I was transferring by establishing the violence strong in the beginning and then got less and less violent as the film went on, thus letting their minds carry. That’s what the pattern of the film was. The pattern of The Birds was deliberately to go slow. And with an unimportant kind of relationship.

I: This has been highly criticized by some critics.

H: I deliberately made it slow.

I: You deliberately made it slow?

H: Oh, no question about it.

I: But it was still — to me, interesting.

H: But the point is, that’s where the critics were wrong, you see, because the effect on an audience isn’t there unless I’ve made them wait deliberately and gone slow.

I: This is timing?

H: This is truer timing. Well, it's just like designing composition in a painting. Or balance of colors. There is nothing accidental, there should never be anything accidental about these things. You’ve got to be very clear in what you are doing and why you're doing it. You know, for example, I think it was the New Yorker once — they don’t review pictures. They don’t review them, they make jokes about pictures anyway. They always have a man who’s supposed not to like the movies — But they had the ridiculous effrontery to say a picture like North by Northwest was unconsciously funny. You know. They really did. Or, Hitchcock is doing a parody of himself Of course, I’m doing it with the tongue in cheek. Psycho was the biggest joke to me. I couldn’t make Psycho without my tongue in my cheek. If I’d been doing Psycho seriously, then it would have been a case history told in a documentary manner. It certainly wouldn’t have been told in terms of mystery and oooooh, look out audience, here comes the bogey man! This is like telling a story to a little boy. It’s like telling a fairy story. You tell it in hushed tones: ‘Ssh! and then the woman went up the stairs!’ That’s all I’m doing. And you’ve got to have a sense of humor to do this.

The Birds (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

I: In The Birds then, there is really no — what you would call theme or message ?

H: All you can say about The Birds is nature can be awful rough on you. If you play around with it. Look what uranium has done. Man dug that out of the ground. The Birds expresses nature and what it can do, and the dangers of nature, because there is no doubt if the birds did decide, you know, with the millions that there are, to go for everybody's eyes, then we'd have H. G. Wells’ Kingdom of the Blind on our hands.

I: I think you took advantage of a natural human trait though, that when, say uranium, or the Bund movement in the ‘30s, or the plague in the medieval times starts to descend upon a given group of people, they don’t want to believe it. They fight against it.

H: Well, or they're helpless with it. You see, the idea of the people in the house, when the birds are attacking and not knowing what to do ... I only had the shutter blow open and the young man try to close the shutter, to tell the audience what it was really like outside. Otherwise, I was asking too much of their imagination. So, I gave them a little sample: White shadows go for his hand ... bloody it up. I'm saying ‘Audience, that's what it's really like outside.’ Only by the millions, not just two, as I’ve just shown. Now the helplessness of the people is no different in that sequence than people in an air raid with nowhere to go. Now, that's where the idea came from. I've been in raids ... in London and the bombs are falling, and the guns are going like hell all over the place. You don't know where to go. Where can you go? Can't go down to the basement. That's kind of sissy, you know.

I: I see ... So you’re just caught.

H: You’re caught! You’re trapped!

– Extract from “Cinema (1963) - Hitchcock on Style: An Interview with Alfred Hitchcock”. Reprinted in Hitchcock on Hitchcock: Volume 1 (1995) edited by Sidney Gottlieb.

Truffaut and Hitchcock: ‘The Wrong Man’

The Wrong Man (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock)

Meeting with journalist Lillian Ross in New York when he was presenting ‘The Soft Skin’ (La peau douce) at the New York Film Festival in 1964, Truffaut discussed the book of interviews with Hitchcock that he was preparing (and that was eventually published in 1966). 

Truffaut talked about his devotion to the work of Hitchcock, whom he referred to as ‘the greatest director of films in the world... Each week for the past few years, I have been going to see at least two of his pictures. “Vertigo” I see at least every two months. … The more I see of Hitchcock’s pictures, the less desire I have to see pictures other than his.’ 

Truffaut went into considerable detail about how much he learned about filmmaking from Hitchcock, in terms of what can be described as the professional and technical aspects of filmmaking, such as:

the principle, extremely important, that an emotion must be created on the screen and then must be sustained—on the technical level as well as on the emotional level. … It is so important to sustain it, even after the character eliciting the emotion leaves the room, goes off the screen. There is so much to learn from Hitchcock—how to keep the camera on the character you want the audience to be interested in, and not cut, even when the character walks all the way across the room.

Truffaut’s engagement with and enthusiasm for Hitchcock’s work did much to establish Hitchcock as a serious cinematic artist, in contrast to the cultivated image of Hitchcock as the master of suspense with its connotations of Hitchcock as a mere technical director. 

The following extract from an early essay by Truffaut on Hitchcock’s ‘The Wrong Man’ takes Hitchcock’s thematic concerns seriously, focusing on significant obsessions of Hitchcock’s: culpability, guilt, the double, while drawing an interesting parallel with Robert Bresson’s ‘A Man Escaped’.

Hitchcock has never been more himself than in this film, which nevertheless runs the risk of disappointing lovers of suspense and of English humor. There is very little suspense in it and almost no humor, English or otherwise. The Wrong Man is Hitchcock's most stripped-down film since Lifeboat; it is the roast without the gravy, the news event served up raw and, as Bresson would say, "without adornment." Hitchcock is no fool. If The Wrong Man, his first black-and-white film since I Confess, is shot inexpensively in the street, subway, the places where the action really occurred, it's because he knew he was making a difficult and relatively less commercial film than he usually does. When it was finished, Hitchcock was undoubtedly worried, for he renounced his usual cameo in the course of the film, and instead showed us his silhouette before the title appeared to warn us that what he was offering this time was something different, a drama based on fact. 

There cannot fail to be comparisons made between The Wrong Man and Robert Bresson’s Un Condamné a Mort s’est échappé (A Man Escaped). It would be foolish to assume that this would work to the detriment of Hitchcock’s film, which is sufficiently impressive right from the start not to have to beg for pride of place. The comparison is no less fascinating when pushed to its utmost, to where the divergences between the two movies cast a mutual light on each other. 

The point of departure is identical: the scrupulous reconstruction of an actual event, its faithful rendering limited solely to the facts. For Bresson’s film is as far from the account of Commandant Devigny as Hitchcock’s is from the event reported in Life magazine. The reality, for both Hitchcock and for Bresson, was simply a pretext, a springboard for a second reality that is the only thing that interests them. 

Since we are discussing the elements they have in common, we should point out that, faced with an identical problem, although they were seeking different solutions, Bresson and Hitchcock coincided on more than one point. For example, the acting. Just like Leterrier in Bresson's film, Henry Fonda is impassive, expressionless, almost immobile. Fonda is only a look. If his attitude is more crushed and more humble than Bresson’s man who is condemned to death, it is because he is not a political prisoner who knows he has won to his cause half the world who thinks as he does, but an ordinary prisoner in criminal court, with all appearances against him and, as the film goes on, less and less chance of proving his innocence. Never was Fonda so fine, so grand and noble as in this film where he has only to present his honest man's face, just barely lit with a sad, an almost transparent, expression. 

Another point in common – indeed the most striking – is that Hitchcock has almost made it impossible for the spectator to identify with the drama's hero; we are limited to the role of witnesses. We are at Fonda’s side throughout, in his cell, in his home, in the car, on the street, but we are never in his place. That is an innovation in Hitchcock’s work, since the suspense of his earlier films was based precisely on identification. 

Hitchcock, the director who is most concerned about innovation, this time wants the public to experience a different kind of emotional shock, something clearly rarer than the famous shiver. One final common point: Hitchcock and Bresson have both built their films on one of those coincidences that make scrupulous screenwriters scream. Lieutenant Fontaine escapes miraculously; the stupid intervention of a hostile juror saves Henry Fonda. To this authentic miracle Hitchcock added another of his own making, and it will doubtless shock my colleagues. Fonda (in the film, he is of Italian descent and is named Balestrero) is lost. Waiting for his second trial, he cannot find any proof of his innocence. His wife is in a mental institution and his mother tells him, ‘You should pray.’ 

So Fonda kneels before a statue of Jesus Christ and prays ‘My God, only a miracle can save me.’ There is a closeup of Christ, a dissolve, and then a shot in the street that shows a man who somewhat resembles Fonda walking toward the camera until the frame catches him in a closeup with his face and Fonda’s superimposed. This is certainly the most beautiful shot in Hitchcock's work and it summarizes all of it. It is the transfer of culpability, the theme of the double, already present in his first English movies, and still present in all his later ones, improved, enriched, and deepened from film to film. With this affirmation of belief in Providence – in Hitchcock's work, too, the wind blows where it will-the similarities culminate and cease. 

With Bresson there is a dialogue between the soul and objects, the relationship of the one to others. Hitchcock is more human, obsessed as always by innocence and guilt, and truly agonized by judicial error. As a motto to The Wrong Man he could have used this pensee of Pascal's: “Truth and justice are two such subtle points that our instruments are too dull to reach them exactly. If they do reach them, they conceal the point and bear down all around, more on what is false than on what is true.” 

Hitchcock offers a film about the role of the accused man, an accused man and the fragility of human testimony and justice. It has nothing in common with documentaries except its appearance; in its pessimism and skepticism.  

– Francois Truffaut, ‘The Wrong Man’ in ‘The Films In My Life’