All my films were made against the desires of the audience because they aim at truth and beauty rather than the spectator’s satisfaction. […] [These days] producers just want to make money, they are like drug peddlers.
~ Andrei Tarkovksy, who would have been 80 years old today.
The relationship I had with Harvey was definitely more like that father-son relationship that you read about in literature and whatnot. I love him to death, but, yeah, I definitely had some issues along the way. … I was an idealist. I was a young man, and I believed kind of everything I was told. And back in those days, we were told, like, ‘This is indie war, man! We’re taking on the studios! They’re making commercial crap, and we’re making art!’ But you know what happens is, a good idea becomes a business, and suddenly there was a day where I was like, we’re listening to marketing data that you’re getting based on trailers. Not even like test-screening a movie — we’re test-screening trailers and poster images. There’s no more gut instinct in this.
~ Director Kevin Smith on Harvey Weinstein, who bought Smith’s first film and guided his career via NPR’s Morning Edition
A great producer is a creative collaborator with the director. Even the most independent directors need strong relationships such as this one.
~ü
This was the opening image for Shame. It was quite a long take, but I think McQueen did it perfectly to describe Brandon’s character. We assume that he’s just had sex, but there is no look of happiness in his face at all. Instead, you get a feeling of his self-loathing. He looks up into the ceiling - a vacant look. He is empty. The sheets are such a vivid blue, yet Brandon pales in comparison. In what should be an act of pleasure, Brandon lacks it. This was the perfect image to invite spectators into Brandon’s world of his desctructive sex addiction.
When a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it. The ear goes more toward the within, the eye toward the outside.
A too expected image (cliché) will never seem right, even if it is.
~ Robert Bresson Notes sur le Cinématographe
My film is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.
Cinematograph is a writing with images in movement and with sounds.
Two kinds of films: those that employ the means of theatre (actors, staging, etc.) and use the camera in order to reproduce, and those that employ the means of the cinematograph and use the camera in order to create.
A whole generation of critics misunderstood Cassavetes so spectacularly that the ones who are still around are probably too embarrassed to take a second look. The Gustav Mahler of cinema, Cassavetes was excoriated in his lifetime for formlessness, lack of focus and modulation, etc. and ad infinitum. And, like Mahler, his work has come back after his death to haunt those who were so quick with their doctrinaire judgments. Actor’s Studio exercises, formless improvisations, and unmodulated emotionalism are all you’re going to see if you look at every movie with the expectation that it will/should be broken up into visually and behaviorally pointed units. Films like A Woman Under the Influence defy a century’s worth of film theory, screenwriting tips, and film school orthodoxy. When you look at a close-up in a film by almost anyone else, you’re looking at a representation of the idea of an emotion, no matter how detailed the acting. In Cassavetes, every blink, every shrug, every hesitation counts and drives the story forward.
What is A Woman Under the Influence? If you look at it from one end of the telescope, it’s a hyper-realistic portrait of a woman going mad, a bravura performance in a vaguely working-class setting, a sort of déclassé Americanization of Ingmar Bergman’s Face to Face (1976), without Bergman. From the other end, it’s a richly detailed experience, alternately soaring and gut-wrenching, composed in two long, mighty, almost-but-not-quite unwieldy movements. And it’s about…what? Men and women? Family life? The difficulty of distinguishing between your real and ideal selves? Male embarrassment? All of the above, none of the above. Tagging a movie like Woman with something as neat as a “subject” is a fairly useless activity. “John had antennae like Proust,” Peter Falk once wrote. A Woman Under the Influence and Faces, probably his two greate
A whole generation of critics misunderstood Cassavetes so spectacularly that the ones who are still around are probably too embarrassed to take a second look. The Gustav Mahler of cinema, Cassavetes was excoriated in his lifetime for formlessness, lack of focus and modulation, etc. and ad infinitum. And, like Mahler, his work has come back after his death to haunt those who were so quick with their doctrinaire judgments. Actor’s Studio exercises, formless improvisations, and unmodulated emotionalism are all you’re going to see if you look at every movie with the expectation that it will/should be broken up into visually and behaviorally pointed units. Films like A Woman Under the Influence defy a century’s worth of film theory, screenwriting tips, and film school orthodoxy. When you look at a close-up in a film by almost anyone else, you’re looking at a representation of the idea of an emotion, no matter how detailed the acting. In Cassavetes, every blink, every shrug, every hesitation counts and drives the story forward.
What is A Woman Under the Influence? If you look at it from one end of the telescope, it’s a hyper-realistic portrait of a woman going mad, a bravura performance in a vaguely working-class setting, a sort of déclassé Americanization of Ingmar Bergman’s Face to Face (1976), without Bergman. From the other end, it’s a richly detailed experience, alternately soaring and gut-wrenching, composed in two long, mighty, almost-but-not-quite unwieldy movements. And it’s about…what? Men and women? Family life? The difficulty of distinguishing between your real and ideal selves? Male embarrassment? All of the above, none of the above. Tagging a movie like Woman with something as neat as a “subject” is a fairly useless activity. “John had antennae like Proust,” Peter Falk once wrote. A Woman Under the Influence and Faces, probably his two greatest films, are both ultimately as impossible to pin down as In Search of Lost Time. Like Proust before him, Cassavetes rode the whims, upsets, vagaries, and mysterious impulses of humanity like a champion surfer.
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