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SIMONE. 23 years and counting. How many more years before she graces our screens?

September 1985. Springsteen and I had dinner at Mirabelle on the Strip to discuss "Born in the USA," a script I'd offered him which he turned down (decided not to get into movies) but subsequently used as a song title. He told me I could use the song or he'd write me another one. I choose the latter and he wrote "Light of Day." Jullianne Phillips had asked me to bring Bruce to a West Hollywood location where she'd planned a surprise birthday party. That's where this pic was taken. Penny Marshall lived nearby so I asked her to . Presumably the shirt's Bruce is holding is some sort of birthday present.

BABY THE RAIN MUST FALL (1965). Watched this for the first time tonight. Very similar to HUD two years earlier. Yet one film is in the cannon, the other isn't. Excellent comparison of a film which hopes to last and one that does.

HARDCORE. In 1978 Eric Kroll did special photography on the film Hardcore. He used the occasion to shoot some erotic photos not from the film. Now, 45 yeas later, here it is.

HOLLAND. Staring Nicole Kidman. The plot's a mess but it does nail West Michigan.

DYING FOR SEX. The second time this year a major actress (Michelle Williams) has gone to that Last Tango space. (Babygirl proceeded it.) Although I'm confused. Is this a male fantasy, a female fantasy or an acurate depiction of the female sexual mind?

THE CANYONS. A new DVD release brought my mind back. Thirteen years ago The Canyons was considered an affront to motion picture proprietary but at the time I just thought it was a cool thing to do. Looking back now, I see it as intirguing social marker of the period. And it's kinda fun. What more can one ask?

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. 25 years. Just rewatched. It has stood the test of time. I think it’s Stephen’s best.

"Dying of the Light," a film I wrote and directed, was taken away from me after the submission of the Director’s Cut (June 2014). Grindstone Pictures and the producers wanted a generic Nick Cage video-on-demand film, while my editorial instincts were pointing toward something more interesting. Grindstone recut, scored, and mixed the film without my input. Subsequently, actors Nicholas Cage and Anton Yeltsin, executive producer Nic Refn and I distanced ourselves from the film. Because we were threatened with lawsuits if we spoke ill of the Grindstone version, our protests took the form of wearing T-shirts bearing the “non-disparagement” clause that prohibited public statements. For now, that’s the only photo I’ll include on this web page. I remain hopeful that someday I will be allowed to finish the film.

Roberto Rossellini's The Rise of Louis XIV was made in 1966 and first shown in the United States at the 1967 New York Film Festival. It was an unpropitious premiere. The theme of the festival was “The Social Film in Cinema” and there was a special seminar on the subject “Reality Cinema: Whose Truth?” These were the halcyon (some would say corrupt) days of cinéma-vérité; four of the many documentary films shown at the festival went on to obtain general release and a hitherto unknown degree of box-office success: Titicut Follies, Don't Look Back, Warrendale, Portrait of Jason, as did a documentary reconstruction film making free use of cinéma-verité techniques, Battle of Algiers. Lost in this rush for cinema-truth was one of the pioneers of the techniques of hand-held camera and documentary reconstruction himself, Roberto Rossellini and few took time to notice that the master had gone his own way, bying many of his disciples. Because of the cold critical reception of The Rise of Louis XIV at the festival, Rossellini was unable to get either the television or theatrical release for which he had been negotiating.

The New York festival was only a microcosm for Rossellini’s difficulties in the sixties. On several occasions he had publicly quarreled with the leaders of the cinéma-vérité movement. At the 1963 UNESCO film conference he accused Jean Rouch of substituting superficial and immediate truth for moral truth. “Rouch” Rossellini told the director of La Punition and Chronicle of a Summer, “You have a talent to create and you use it to tear down” (Artsept, April-June 1963). In turn cinéma-vérité theorist Louis Marcorelles accused Rossellini of “forget(ing) his own early films” and of “pointless aestheticism” (Sight and Sound, Summer 1963). The cinéma-vérité spokesmen carried the day; their films were released, exhibited and praised. Rossellini was unable to work in the commercial cinema and like Jean Renoir turned to French television for . His 1957 film India was never released in and his subsequent documentary reconstructions, Age of Iron (1965) and The Rise of Louis XIV (1966) were only exhibited commercially in and Italy.

But last year (1970) when The Rise of Louis XIV was finally released in New York the critical apathy had turned to enthusiasm. The New York Times, which in 1967 had described Louis as “a mounting bore” now wrote that “it is surely a masterpiece”. The New Yorker, Newsweek, and New Republic all followed suit with laudatory reviews and Louis had an unexpected six-week New York run, out-grossing Truffaut's Wild Child in the same art house circuit. After a decade of cinéma- vérité films, audiences and critics seemed more willing to accept a documentary approach which sought truth not in the immediate moment but in study and reflection. The successful 1970 release of The Rise of Louis XIV may signal a return to what Rossellini calls “moral responsibility” in documentary films and it will hopefully return Rossellini to a pre-eminent place in the field of documentary and documentary reconstruction. Rossellini is pioneering a method of film reconstruction of the distant past which may have as far-reaching implications as did his post-war reconstructions of the immediate past.

The Rise of Louis XIV reconstructs the kingship of Louis (Jean-Marie Patte) from the death of his godfather Mazarin (Silvagni) in 1661, when Louis was 22, to his construction of Versailles in the 1680's. At the outset of the film the king is a fop and a pawn of his guardians. After Mazarin's protracted death he unexpectedly announces “I will govern” and begins to consolidate his power. The Queen Mother Anne of Austria (Katharina Renn) is gracefully removed from her position of power and the vain Foquet (Pierre Barrat) is gracelessly arrested in his own capital. Louis’ rise is climaxed when he constructs the immense Versailles, populates it with sycophants and establishes extravagant rules of court manners and dress to woo the noble class away from their local power bases and place them under his financial mein. His “dandyism” is transformed into a power structure and his elders are the pawns. These Machiavellian maneuvers completed, the king, in the final scene of the film, slowly strips himself of his many outer garments and contemplates a maxim by La Rochefoucauld: “Neither death nor the sun can be faced steadily.” The ultimate fantasy of the aristocrat has been fully achieved and the world's last great monarch is firmly established.

The Rise of Louis XIV is the second in a series of nonfiction historical films Rossellini has made since 1964. The others include: The Age of Iron (1964) in five one-hour episodes, Acts of the Apostles (1968) in four one-hour and one hour-and-a-half episodes, and Socrates (1970). In addition he has completed a script about Caligula and is presently writing a script on the American Revolution (for the U.S. bicentennial celebration).

Louis is evidence of a theory and method of film-making Rossellini has developed throughout the sixties. The theory, at its simplest, is one of didacticism: film must set its roots in information and ideas. But unlike cinema's other great contemporary didacticist, Godard, Rossellini has turned to history for his subject matter. It is only in the past that ideas can be isolated and defined. Rossellini seems more interested in understanding what has happened than effecting what will happen.

As early as 1958 Rossellini stated these “humble” intentions: “What I am trying to do is a piece of research, a documentation, on the state of man all over the world. As I find dramatic subjects I may move towards fiction film. But the first stage has to be research, the observation, and this has to be systematic” (Sight and Sound, Winter 1958-59). The first stage of Rossellini's method is, similarly, study and research. A filmmaker must learn everything he can about his subject matter, both from history and art, documents of the period and subsequent studies. These historically verifiable facts must then be presented on screen in the most coldly objective manner possible; they cannot be tampered with. The filmmaker cannot let his ego or emotions (or those of his actors, cameraman or editor) editorialize upon or empathize with those facts. (Rossellini faults Fellini's Satryicon and Visconti's The Damned for doing this.) The past cannot be predicated upon present-day knowledge and attitudes. No one involved in a Rossellini film can project, act, or interpret what he does; there can be no attempt to directly evoke audience empathy.

This false “objectivity” (pretending the past is beyond interpretive alteration), of course, is an interpretation of its own, but its effect on the viewer is crucially different from conventional film interpretations of history. Because Rossellini makes no attempt to plunge the viewer into the drama of the past, making the past relevant to his immediate feelings (much of Louis seems rightly irrelevant), the viewer has a sense of detachment rather than involvement, of awareness rather than empathy. He can fix his attention on the subtler, more revealing aspects of the past—the way meetings are conducted, gestures are made, curtains are hung. It is at this level, within rather than beyond history, that one finds Rossellini's “interpretation” of Louis XIV.

The second stage of Rossellini’s method, therefore, is aesthetic: organization and refinement. If it is also entertaining, ironic and interpretive, as it is, then these qualities are extensions of the aestheticism. The facts of the past must be framed and organized in such a manner as to reveal their—not Rossellini's, not our—intrinsic truth. This truth must not only correspond to history, but to art, not only to the political legacy of Louis XIV, but to the moral and artistic legacy as well.

Here, then, is the paradox of Rossellini's method: on one hand the film-maker must be factually faithful to the past, not interjecting his emotions or interpretations; on the other hand he must have a sufficient aesthetic vision to structure scenes and events so that they reveal their intrinsic “truth” and are not simply anecdotal yarns or cinéma-vérité snatches of life. How does a film-maker frame and organize the past so that it reveals its essential truth, both factual and moral, without he himself becoming the creator of that past?

Rossellini is exploring some near-virgin territory in the fields of documentary reconstruction and historical presentation and it is difficult to know what yardstick of success or failure can be applied to a film like Louis. One must be careful not to apply inappropriate criteria, such as those used by Marcorelles: it makes little sense to fault Rossellini for not being Donn Pennebaker. Rossellini’s method is certainly opposed to that of the cinéma-vérité film-makers but it is also in opposition to almost every previously successful method of historical film presentation. It is unlike that of John Ford, which seeks the mythological truth of the past; it is unlike that of Penn and Peckinpah, which seeks the moral truths of the present in the past; it is unlike that of the Encyclopedia Britannica documentarians, which seeks the factual truth of the past. Those who search out past models for every current success (O tempora, O mores, Herman Weinberg!) will have a difficult time finding suitable precedents for Rossellini's recent series of historical documentaries.

The Rise of Louis XIV should be analyzed, I think, first and foremost as Rossellini intended it, as history. It should not be initially thought of as a Roberto Rossellini film, or as a parable for modern times. Louis’ filmic past should have a validity as past. The test of the past should be as thorough as possible and should include, one, the test of factuality: is Louis true to the letter of history book law? Two, the test of past credibility: do the actions and ideas of the film naturally spring from its mood and style, or does it falsely use a contemporary sensibility to portray past events? Three, the test of present credibility: without violating the necessary isolation of past credibility, does the film contain the seeds for subsequent cultural and political events? Four, the test of art and artifacts: is the film true to the spirit of the relics of Louis’ reign, in art, literature, songs, religious texts? If Louis XIV es the test of the past, then it is only natural (and necessary) to ask why. How can a film seem to be true to the past when it is necessarily the collaboration between present-day artists and modern film communication? Asked in this way, the question can give a clue to Rossellini's true aesthetic ‘interpretation’ of the past.

To document the reign of Louis XIV, Rossellini sought the aid of scholar Philippe Erlanger, whose monumental study of Louis has recently been published in English. Erlanger supplied the original story and data, insuring the film's adherence to the historical evidence. They did not stack Louis’ career, but instead attempted to present all sides of it equally: his success as well as failure, his cleverness as well as his blinding vanity. Louis is both politically brilliant: he insures his power by cutting the ties between the nobility and the peasantry; and short-sighted: he implicitly rejects his Economic Minister’s advice to tie himself to the peasantry by cutting taxes. Neither of these events is given weight over the other; they contain equally important information about a politically complex figure.

Louis XIV not only gives facts, however, it also conveys the sense of time and place in which those facts have meaning. This sense is not only revealed in the obvious characteristics of the period, like rampant sycophantism, the political vacuum of the upper echelons of power, and the total lack of moral direction from the Church, but also in the subtler social aspects such as dress, gait and gesture.

The film opens, for example, with the death of Cardinal Mazarin, the King’s godfather. At Mazarin’s bedside the court doctors one by one sniff a basin of his urine and after some contemplation and debate they decide that although his death is imminent Mazarin should be bled anyway. The bleeding begins; the livid, sweating Mazarin winces in pain as the blood is drained from his emaciated body. From this point the excretory smell only grows stronger. Several hours later, shortly before the young king's last visit to his bed-side, Mazarin paints himself with rouge and make-up to give himself the illusion of health. The falseness and sham are apparent to everyone, yet they are nonetheless essential and effective for being false. Such is Louis’ world.

The compositions and editing reinforce the cumulative smell of stench. Each frame has an ornate, sickly love of detail. There are few clear cut lines; reds and yellows bleed into each other. There are few wide open Spaces; most scenes take place in claustrophobic, baroque rooms with the sycophants crowding the frame for a place near Louis. Until the concluding, thematic scene Louis is never seen alone. All of his activities, love-making, eating, dressing, strolling, are public spectacles. Louis does not alleviate this claustrophobic decadence; he heightens and manipulates it. At the outset of the film the of the court wear relatively somber black and white costumes, but when Louis introduces his new sybaritic mode of dress, the frame becomes increasingly cluttered with trains and ruffles and unfriendly, clashing color schemes.

Yet Rossellini’s stoical camera never reacts against this accumulation of discordant detail. It does not, like Visconti’s camera in The Damned, zoom, track and jump about these lurid settings. The stolid camera simply sits, soaking everything into its disionate gaze. Rossellini's camera is like one of Louis’ courtiers; it watches, it knows, it obeys. For the modern viewer it is as if Mazarin's basin of urine is setting on a pedestal at the front of the theater: everyone knows it is there, the smell growing increasingly rank, yet no one gets up to remove it.

The Rise of Louis XIV has an almost terrifying sense of past credibility: those ludicrous costumes and risible court manners are no longer the senseless affectations one always thought they were, but are the precise machinations of power. No action seems too silly, no pretense too great: these are the marks of a truly totalitarian government which can transform vanity into a source of power. Without violating this immediate sense of the past, Louis also offers a present-day credibility: the seeds of anarchy and revolution lie everywhere dormant. As the spectator’s desire to clean out the cluttered frame, to overturn that basin of dead man's piss, grows, so does his comprehension of the unrestrained frenzy of the French Revolution. In Rossellini's film there is both the image of complete order and restraint and the suppressed rage for chaos.

Louis XIV is also true, at the fourth level, to the art of the period it portrays. There remains nothing today which has survived Louis XIV quite as well as Versailles itself. Long after his power has vanished, his legend faded, his political effect diminished, Louis’ masterwork still tells his story. It has an order, a symmetry, a totally unfunctional ornateness which represents Louis better than all the historical records. In these halls, balustrades and gardens the sun king still shines, The Rise of Louis XIV has the same order, decadence and vanity as Versailles. Like Versailles, Rossellini's film has both a sense of symmetry and circuitousness. There are no clean lines, no functionality: everything seems pomp and circumstance, and the underlying structure is everpresent. Like Versailles, Louis XIV gives the modern spectator the immediate sense of an anachronistic past; like the old relic, it has survived to give us information about and ideas of the past.

There is a natural tendency to say that the past of the film is Rossellini’s past and its Louis is Rossellini's Louis (as José Luis Guarner does in his recent book on Rossellini) but this is unfair to the intent of Rossellinis method and misses the true value of his work. Rossellini does not care to make the past ‘relevant’ or ‘personal’; he only desires to give it validity as past. If the past is valid as past, Rossellini would say, then it is necessarily relevant to all humans. When asked how Louis XIV “relate(s) to us today?” Rossellini replied, “I don’t know and I don’t care. What is relevant is to know the facts of history and because we are the same it is good to know” (Medium, Winter 67-68). The filmic Louis is first of all history's Louis, and it is Rossellini's method which has enabled history to take such a meaningful form. Not until one first realizes the audacity and genius required to put history's Louis on film, can one truly appreciate Rossellini's accomplishment.

Rossellini's contribution is simple but crucial: he allows the past to stand in its own right; he assembles the many threads of history and art so that they reveal their intrinsic truth. Like other masters of visual composition and structure, Rossellini’s power lies in his ability to let an image reveal itself rather than make it reveal itself. No emotional or editorial contrivances are forced upon the image; it is not made to twist or turn, to run or jump, to hide or camouflage. Rossellini has great respect for the power of the photographed image, for its composition and lines of force, for its “inner dynamic”.

The Rise of Louis XIV evidences a thoroughgoing economy of artistic means. There are many long two or more minute takes and a minimum of lateral camera movement. The action and decor are precisely organized within the frame and the camera examines them from a fixed position. The settings are fixed; the characters enter into them, discuss matters trivial and weighty, and exit. The emphasis throughout the film remains on the ornate decor, the elaborate, meticulously constructed Late Baroque world of Versailles and seventeenth century . There is little ‘’acting’’ per se. The actors are non-professionals who recite their lines by rote and without inflection. The editing is also extremely functional; it is the necessary glue which affixes one tableau to the next.

Yet all these seemingly anonymous techniques are guided by Rossellini's directorial hand. It is he who frames each image and sets each shot next to its neighbor, and if the accumulation of these frames seems to reveal Louis' true history, its vanity, power and moral vapidity, then it is Rossellini who has allowed it to happen.

Rossellini's formal techniques do not mean that Louis was any more quiescent than ourselves or that his regime is somehow best represented by the long take. These are instead the techniques which best enable the viewer to understand the past. Like history itself, Rossellini’s film asks to be analyzed rather than participated in. This may not seem unusual for the historian, but it is relatively unique for the filmgoer. Rarely is a viewer able to intellectually analyze a subject as he is watching it; detached comprehension is inevitably sacrified to the relentless march of melodrama. What's the use of history if the kids don't dig it? The bookish historian may want film to help him experience the past, but the intellectually-starved moviegoer needs film to help him understand it. And Rossellini, like a few great didacticists, can walk this tightrope between empathy and awareness.

The value of analyzing a subject as you see it is simply that you see more. The viewer can study the seemingly insignificant events and objects which would normally him by. It is like seeing a film for the second time the first time. There are no compelling plots or strong characterizations to monopolize the viewer's interest, the viewer has the time and inclination to examine all that Rossellini's presents: not only the themes but the details, not only the dialogue but the compositions. In this detached perspective Louis' color scheme plays as important a role as its politics. The truth of the past lies as much in the forgotten gesture as in the consequential execution, and if the viewer can be aware of them both simultaneously then he understands it more. When a viewer makes the connections between the seemingly trivial and the supposedly weighty, he goes beyond history book facts to a comprehension of the unity of a time and place: its facts, customs, morality, ideas.

Rossellini’s ‘interpretation’ of history, therefore, is elusive because it is aesthetic. On one hand Rossellini, like a philosopher and historian, has a firmly-rooted understanding of and respect for man's past, on the other hand, like an artist, he has the ability to recreate it. Neither of his occupations, historian and artist, seems subservient to the other, and his recent films have the unexpected impact of both history and art.

Some reviewers, such as Penelope Gilliatt of the New Yorker, were a bit taken back to find Rossellini “of all people” espousing à cold, factual cinema. This certainly seems at odds with his textbook reputation, which presently has him cast as the neo-realist director of Open City and Paisan, films whose “realism’’ was more personal than cold, more political than unbiased, more naturalistic than objective. To many filmgoers, Rossellini is still the neo-realist hero of Siegfried Kracauer and John Howard Lawson, and they find it difficult to realize that he has grown while their viewpoint has remained fixed. (Like a star, a director can become critically typecast.) The evolution of Rossellini's documentary aesthetic, however, could catch even the most astute moviegoer by surprise: in the same month (March, 1963) Rossellini was attacking Rouch for cinematic immorality, Truffaut was explaining the debt of Rivette, Godard, Rouch and himself to the director of Open City and Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, Editions Segher).

André Bazin, in 1957, was one of the first to defend Rossellini from the charges which would be leveled against him in the sixties. Bazin contended that Rossellini's Voyage in Italy (1953) was not a break from the neo-realist principles, but a continuation and extension of them. “With him,” Bazin wrote, “neo-realism naturally rediscovers the style and the means of abstraction. For to respect reality does not mean to accumulate details: on the contrary, it means to strip reality of everything that is not essential, to achieve totality in simplicity” (Qu'est-ce que le Cinema? IV). If Bazin were alive today I'm sure he could adapt the term neo-realism to describe The Rise of Louis XIV, but the essential point is not one of semantics. Rossellini's recent films are a refinement of his neo-realist techniques, not a break from them. What many viewers thought was the heart of his neo-realist style turned out to be the vignettish, personal periphery, and he has gradually stripped it away. The heart of his “neo-realist” documentary approach is aesthetic perception: the setting of realist tableaux side by side in such a manner as to reveal their lasting value, their autonomous validity as events and ideas.

It is this rare, elusive aesthetic perception which so many historical films and documentaries lack. Of all the documentaries which received greater favor than Louis XIV at the 1967 New York Festival, none could offer its moral and intellectual complexity. The cinéma-vérité documentarians played an indispensable role in the film-making of the sixties, they revitalized film technique and brought the man on the street in front of the camera. But it is time, I think, for the cinéma- vérité film-makers to be revitalized themselves, and for this they can do no better than to return to the footsteps of their old mentor, Roberto Rossellini.

The recent Maysles brothers cinéma-vérité film Gimme Shelter, for example, is a shameless mixture of pandering and profiteering. Their subject matter ranges from the death of a man to the death of a movement, yet they pretend to be the everpresent innocents. The Maysles could point their camera in the right direction, but they simply were not equipped to give their subject matter the moral and historical perspective it demanded. The aging youth movement desperately needs a Rossellini: one who respects the integrity of his material, understands it, and can organize it.

For the third time in his career Rossellini has returned to the creative forefront of his trade. In his first Open City period, in his early fifties films with Ingrid Bergman, and now in his historical documentaries, Rossellini has shown film-makers a new, distinctly moral direction. When the treatment of reality on screen is again at a crucial stage, when Godard is drifting away into rhetoric, when many cinéma-vérité film-makers have opted for the facile truth and the quick dollar, when the Newsreel documentarians proceed as if there were no past, Rossellini has again shown us the way.

Los Angeles Free Press – December 4, 1970

What is the most miscast movie? We all have our favorites but I’ll start with Guys and Dolls. Brando and Simmons.

Will Anora stand the test of time?

Wrapped OH CANADA tonight. I have not posted about it during filming because, although we had WGA and SAG waivers, there were rogue union who sought to picket even legitimate productions and I had cast and crew who did not want to be stigmatized by crossing an illegitimate picket line. But that's in the past. Principal photography is completed. Thanks again to Richard Gere. Uma Thurman, Jake Elordi and all the "Oh, Canada" cast and crew.

TWO ORIGINAL ENDINGS. When "Chilly Scenes of Winter" was eleased in 1979 it had an upbeat ending. When the response was lackluster, the film was recut and retitled "Head over Heels" with a downbeat ending--more in sync with the ending of Anne Beattie's novel. Criterion has now released both. The Chilly Scenes upbeat ending and Head over Heels with the downbeat Beattie ending. So which is it? Two films, two titles, two endings? Or one film, two titles, one ending?

Watched atypical and relatively unknown Hitchcock rom-com RICH AND STRANGE (East of Shanghai, 1931). Dynamic camera when non sync. static when characters speak. With inter-titles. Can see Hitch trying things out. Must for Francophiles: a period Follies Bergere montage.

PAUL SCHRADER MATCHMAKER.

French crime cinema was overshadowed by the Nouvelle Vague and BREATHLESS, but there are gems in the genre. CLASSE TOUS RISQUES (1960) is one of the bleakest films made. I can't think of an American crime film so devoid of hope.

THERE IS A NEW CINEMA LANGUAGE. After seeing film after film in the international lineup it's clear that multitasking, video games and digital filmmaking have changed the language of cinema. What was once considered experimental in style and narrative has become normative. How is it possible to "teach" directing? You can teach time management, working with actors, lenses and lighting, but there are no longer "directing" rules.

Aftersun. That is no longer an experimental film.

REIGN OF TERROR, 1949. A wackadoddle classic. Robespierre costume period piece film directed by Anthony Mann. Film noir in lace cuffs. No script to speak of. Miscast. Shot by John Alton at his most "Altonistic." Set your cinephilliac head spinning like Linda Blair's.

"It's been six years now since Taxi Driver was released." Mark my mind boggled. Technology serves up twists to our memory. Loved those glasses and that green sweater with the racing horses.

DAVID LYNCH STORY. Nicolas Saada, a film friend from Paris, wrote to tell me a story about David I'd forgotten. Here's how it goes: "Dino asked you to read the Blue Velvet screenplay. You said you loved it and could not improve it. When you met Lynch during his prep, you asked him if the title Blue Velvet was a reference to Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising. He told you he had never seen it. You sent him a VHS tape of the film. A year later, you met Lynch at the premiere party of Blue Velvet in LA and asked him if he got the Scorpio Rising vhs. 'Oh yes, Paul, I got it. Thank you.' 'Did you watch it?' "I did.' 'And what did you think?' 'Well, to be honest, it didn't like it at all, Paul.' 'Oh...why?' 'I don't know. I found it weird.' Possibly the best David Lynch story ever."

‘I told them: There’s no way I can improve Blue Velvet’

David couldn’t get Blue Velvet made. Dino De Laurentiis told David he’d pay me to rewrite the script and David gave it to me. It was one of the best scripts I’d ever read. I told Dino there was no way I could improve it. David thanked me and Dino financed the film. The rest is film history. The only thing to add is this: smoking kills.

via ‘David Lynch altered our brains’: fellow directors, friends and fans a titan of cinema by Catherine Shoard 
The Guardian — 17 January, 2025

HER. Because of this NYT article I rewatched "Her" tonight. It's even more relevant, prescient and deeply creepy than it was ten years ago. This film grows in stature. I liked it then, I love it now. There's only one like it.

THE RETURN. Ralph Fiennes’ turn as an aging, muscle-bound, prosthetically enhaced Odysseus is a revellation. Just when you suspect those who say TV offers nothing to thinking adults, something like this turns up.

It’s purely coincidental that the material was religious in nature, even though I’ve done a number of things in the religious vein. I had been a fan of Leonard’s stuff and told my agency how much I liked his work. This was the one book he’d done with a religious background. And in making the film I tried to stay more true to Leonard’s sensibility.

I didn't go out of my way to emphasise the metaphorical quality of the title. To be honest, one of the problems the film faces in the marketplace is that it doesn’t tell you what to feel or think at any given juncture. It plays very much by Elmore Leonard’s rules. It’s very tongue-in-cheek—throwing the sacred and the profane together, tooth and jowl, and saying to the audience, ‘You figure it out." So you’ll go right from the most sacred thing to the most scabrous dialogue, and 1 find that kind of great fun.

The problem was the tone, and I suspect that will bedevil the film all through its theatrical and video life. You have healing and stigmata, and on the other hand it’s a comedy and a love story. So, what is it? Please tell us. Make it clear for us. And the film really doesn’t tell you what it is, because it’s all and both. The unfortunate truth is that movies that tend to be successful arc movies that don't leave anything up to the viewer, movies that tell you exactly how you’re supposed to feel at any given moment and reward you for feeling the way you’re told to feel.

The roles could be played by any number of actors; you could go in many directions with these roles. So for every actor I had a big list. The hard part is to mix and match parts. At one point, Tim Robbins was going to do the role that Tom Arnold plays, and Tim had convinced me that the character wasn't a snotty little villain like he’s written in the book, but is just a big kid. Against Tim I had cast Bob Hoskins in the role that Chris Walken plays. When the film moved from Miramax to Lumiere, Tim was no longer available. So I started looking around for another big kid, and I ended up with Tom Arnold, who’s probably the biggest kid of all. But then Bob Hoskins didn’t want to do it — you can’t put Tom and Bob together because they're working off the same energy source. Then Chris Walken, who’s a good friend of mine, who I had always thought to be a little too much teeth-and-elbows for this movie — I thought, ‘Wait a second: if I have Tom Arnold, I can ask Chris now, because there’s nothing Chris can do to Tom.'

Tom is such a hectic, hyperactive character that I was surprised at how much homework he had done. Growing up in Iowa, he did local theatre, and then he did stand-up comedy. And that’s pretty good training, to be honest.

Juvenal was a very difficult role to cast because the character is so ive. How do you keep this character from ‘going beige’ on you? Because an actor can't juice up the role. And if you play into the ivity, he disappears. But Skeet had something — an acetic look. My first reaction was: he will keep you interested without violating the character.

I didn’t find it necessary to do much research into faith healing beyond the text of Leonard’s novel. My religious background was pretty much the other sort — Dutch Calvinism, all mind and no body, where basically you’re supposed to think yourself to heaven.

The same week that TOUCH comes out, I start shooting a film called AFFLICTION from a novel by Russell Banks, with Nick Nolte, James Coburn, and Willem Dafoe. It's a strong piece of material, about a small town cop who thinks he’s solving a murder when in fact he’s going crazy. It's sort of nice to slip back into something very gritty.

via "Touch: Paul Schrader adapts Elmore Leonard's quirky novel of faith & healing" by David Skal. 
Cinefantastique Magazine, Vol. 8, No. 8. Feb 1997

Bob knew the well.

Clarification. AMERICAN GIGOLO. After the Showtime trailer appeared online I've been asked if I am involved. The answser is No. Some years ago I received a call from Paramount asking about remaking American Gigolo as a series. I replied that I thought it was a terrible idea--times had changed, internet porn had redefined male sex work, viruses, etc. I couldn't imagine Julian Kay working a Hen Party. (Scorsese and I had fought off similar attempts to redo Taxi Driver for years.) I thought that was the end of it. Then came another call saying Jerry Bruckheimer and Paramount had the rights to redo AG without my consent. I said I would think about how such a show could be structured. No, the caller explained, they did not want my involvement. Here were my options: (1) take $50G and not be involved (2) take $0 and not be involved (3) threaten an expensive and futile lawsuit and not be involved. I took the $50G. I haven't seen the trailer. I'm a great fan of John Bernthal and wish Gretchen Mol the best (also wish I could have done a better job with the film I wrote and directed for her--sorry for that, Gretch). I don't plan to watch the Showtime series. I don't think I could be objective about it and, even if I could, it's too much agita.

WALTZING WITH BRANDO. Timothée Chalamet's Dylan is brilliant as is Angelina's Callas, but Billy Zane takes his portrait of Marlon Brando to an another level. Maddening complex and contradictory, Zane's Brando is as close as we’ll get to this human enigma. 

Other parts of the story are less well served.

DAHOMEY. Inventive doc with questionable premises: (1) art should be repatriated to country or origen (2) sacred art is sacred first, art second (3) art is not a commodity.

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR. I've been thinking about this film since even before Almodovar made it. Pedro beat me to the punch.

[No caption]

James Coburn, Russell Banks and Nick Nolte on the set of AFFLICTION.

I got suckered into the Exorcist thing, because John Frankenheimer died, and he was originally scheduled to direct. I shouldn’t have done it, but it was a “go” film, everything, but it was not people that I should be working with and not people who really respected me. People I very quickly came not to respect myself. And so that was a mistake.

via 'Paul Schrader Thought He Was Dying. So He Made a Movie About It.' by Bilge Ebiri

BABYGIRL, which is mesmerizing, has my head turned in so many directions. What would be the reaction if a man made this? Could a man make this? How the Hell did it even get made?

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN. I love this movie. I say that as someone who has known Dylan and this time period. Now I want to see the next one. Then the one after that. There is no six year period in Bob Dylan's life that isn't fascinating.

DAY OF THE JACKAL. Very much liked this episodic. Eddie Redmayne was a revelation. In Episode One I was waiting for him to get caught. By Episode Six I was hoping he wouldn't be.

Fan of the original film. Redmayne in fact reminded me of Edward Fox.

REEP. I recieve unsolicited scripts and films, the majority of which I ignore. Jakub Blank sent me his experimental short film "Reep" and something about his description piqued my interest. So I watched it.

And it caught me in a smart way. Similiar to something I might have done--yet very different. So l asked him if I could post it and he complied. Although it's been seen on the short film festival circuit, this is its streaming premiere.

Mindless Entertainment Department: veteran screenwriter William Bowers has written a funny script for a film with the suspiciously corny title of
" Your Local Sheriff". It concerns the
breakdown of corruption in a small gold rush town. Jim Garner plays the only role he can-a casual, bumbling fast gun who mysteriously finds everything going right for him.

Excellent comic performances are given by Joan Hacket, a "Group"" discovery, and Harry Morgan, a veteran TV and film actor, both of whom have yet to receive the major comic role they deserve.

Los Angeles Free Press – March 28, 1969

WENT THE DAY WELL? 1942, Albert Cavalcanti.

I was gobsmocked when I saw this in film school and it's still the damndest thing. A British WWIl propaganda film (written by Graham Greene) made when the outcome of the war was far from certain. Yet it radiates English manners and Ealing comic set pieces. In the film, German paratroopers take over an English village and are undone by the populace and the Home Guard--after considerable bloodshed.

The Americans were making strident "Why We Fight" docs while the Brits, in far greater peril, were serving tea and crumpets with their resistance. This, combined with Humphrey Jennings' docs, makes British films singular in the history of war propaganda. Film Forum is showing it as part of their Ealing series. It's also available on Apple and Amazon.

Great see see Michael and Joannie together (w/Elvis Costello). I still bear the pained responsibility for the failure of Light of Day. I miscast it. It wasn't Michael or Joan, it was mixture of them as brother and sister. They were chalk and cheese. They did their best but the fault was mine.

Imdb lists thirty producers for Wim Wenders' Submergence but this falls short of the forty producers listed for Scorsese's Silence. Is Marty the current record holder?

THE CONCLAVE is an excellent film on many levels. 1. An anthropological look into a society known only to a few 2. Intellectually rigorous and complex 3. A masterpiece of imagery. The shots are primarily static, each composed with a precise painterly eye. Among the year's best. Not to be missed.

I have an enduring fondness for this film which got caught in the cultural meatgrinder ten years back. I remarked to Eric Kohn after reading his negative Indiewire review: "You made the mistake that is so tempting to reviewers. You reviewed the phenomenon and not the film."

‘Why I Love The Canyons’ by Aryan Tauqeer Khawaja

Every film l've written or directed circles around the drain of suicide. I believe I have another film in me. It's called "The Card Counter," with Oscar Issac, Tiffany Haddish, Tye Sheridan and Willem Dafoe, which I am now trimming and temp scoring and which fills me with satisfaction and accomplishment. Whenever or however it is released.

It's another character study. A man in a room, in a mask, waiting for something to happen.

There has been a great deal of talk about Czechoslovakian cinema but very little corroboration as far as the United States is concerned. If you think Czech humor is limited to "Loves of a Blond" and Czech tragedy to "Shop on Main Street" then you should see Vera Chutilova's "Daisies" showing Saturday at the County Art Museum. This film and one shown earlier, Jan Nemec’s "Report on the Party and the Guests" are enough to justify all that hullabaloo about the New Czech Cinema.

Los Angeles Free Press – March 28, 1969

THE SHOCK OF THE OLD. "Immoral Tales" by Walerian Borowczyk appeared on Kanopy. It seemed intriguing so I watched. It's four bawdy blasphemous historical tales featuring beautiful nude young people. Softcore of a highest order. Each breast paler and plumper that the last. I was surprised that anyone had the guts to make such a film in this day and age. When it was over I checked online. The film was made in 1973. Over the past 50 years the film industry has relegated salacious narrative film fun to the internet. I don't think this is a filmmaker's choice. It's a viewer's choice.

ATTN. JOHN ALTON FANS. The Crooked Way (1949) is playing on Roku. This is Alton at his Atonesque.

To Pat Resnick: I rewatched Altman's Buffalo Bill tonight (I've been revisiting 70's American cinema for reasons I can't fully explain). Are you an extra sitting next to Keitel in the Grover Cleavland command performance? I think I recognized you. Paul S.

How did I miss this?

One's history, one's career and to some extent film history can hang on a single moment. In 1973 Robert DeNiro wanted to make his first starring role in "The Gambler." He also wanted to do "Taxi Driver.” Gambler was a go a Paramount with Karl Reisz as director. I was friends with Jim Toback at the time. Bobby did a screen test for Reisz. He felt this was his shot. It was a natural for him. But Karl didn't like Bobby. Jimmy got on his hands and knees and pleaded with Karl to hire DeNiro. Karl said no and hired James Caan.

DeNiro waited a year and did Taxi Driver. (At least that's how Jimmy Toe related the story to me--Paramount could also have been pulling strings.) How would careers have been changed if Bob had his breakout role in The Gambler? Film history is chockablock with such mysteries.

If Richard Dreyfus had done All the Jazz (as was planned) or George Sega did Ten (as was planned)...

These are films that have stood the test of time for me. Long-term relationships...

• The Rules of the Game
• Tokyo Story
• Pickpocket
• Citizen Kane
• The ion of Joan of Arc
• The Conformist
• Vertigo
• Masculin Féminin
• City Lights
• The Searchers

[See subsequent Sight and Sound ballots here.]

• The Rules of the Game
• Tokyo Story
• Pickpocket
• Citizen Kane
• The Lady Eve
• Beauty and the Beast
• The Conformist
• Vertigo
• The Searchers
• The Wild Bunch

[via IndieWire.]

• Oh, Canada
• The Seed of the Sacred Fig
• The Brutalist
• Conclave
• Emilia Pérez
• A Complete Unknown
• My First Film
• Babygirl
• I Saw the TV Glow

1. First Reformed
2. Clouds of Sils Maria
3. The Student
4. Ida
5. The Irishman
6. Boyhood
7. Burning
8. Pain and Glory
9. The Tree of Life
10. Leviathan

[SEE LIST NOTES]

When asked how his creative process has evolved over the last 50 years, Schrader says, "It's gotten freer. It's gotten better."

"Having done this for decades, I've figured out what I don't need," he explains. "So much money is wasted in Hollywood because directors are indecisive about what they need, and that's usually because they’ve gotten burnt in the past. At one point or another, they've thought, 'Oh, we don’t need this scene,' and then it turns out that they did need that scene."

"The tendency many have when they're directing now seems to be, 'Let's fill up our plate,'" Schrader says. "'So what if 25 percent of the food goes in the waste can?'"

• Through a Glass Darkly

  Through a Glass Darkly made me realize that films could be serious art. At the time, I was a student at Calvin College, which was also a seminary, and movies were not allowed by the church. But it was the '60s then and things were changing, you know? There was a cinema in town that had all sorts of Russ Meyer-esque softcore programming and the owner wasn't doing very well, so he thought, "Well, I'm gonna program a month of Ingmar Bergman films for all the college students," and it caught fire.

  All these students who had been studying theology and Calvinism had been told that the movies were the devil's workplace and nothing good was really going to come out of them, but then they started going to the movies and thinking, "Wait a second. There's this guy in Sweden who's talking about the very same things we're talking about. How can movies be bad? How can they not be part of the spiritual experience if they're engaging in these conversations in pretty much the same way?"

  So, that film was a revelation for me. Before it, I'd only seen a few movies, and I had been pretty disappointed in them because I didn't watch them as a kid. I'd watch teen fare like Wild in the Country and be left a little unimpressed. But then I saw Through a Glass Darkly and it was the first film that I felt like I really saw as an adult — even though I was only 18 at the time.

• Pickpocket

  When I saw Pickpocket, I saw what my artistic mission could be. From the spareness and the asceticism, to the decision to not give the audience as much as they want but more than they need to get to where you want them to go. It really all has to do with the film's manipulation of time and the way that it deals with Gilles Deleuze's theories about film as action versus film as time. Ultimately, it's about waiting and what things can happen when you wait.

  When I saw it for the first time, what I saw was this: In a normally edited film, when a person walks out of a room, you cut out of the room just before the door latches. That's usually considered a good cut. But Bresson would let the door close and then take two beats before cutting to something else. What's happening in those moments? Nothing. Time is happening. Time is all that's happening. He's talking to you by working with time. Now, what would happen if he waited five beats? Ten beats? What if his name happened to be Béla Tarr and he waited even longer? Using time to alter expectations and certain anticipations, that's what I saw in Bresson.

• The Conformist

  The Conformist liberated me visually. The film really broke the mold of production design, primarily due to the work by Ferdinando Scarfiotti. As a filmmaker, Bertolucci combined the time manipulation of Antonioni with the vivid editorial juxtapositions of Godard, and he really used production design to combine all of those things together. The Conformist was the first film I know of that treated locations like they were sets. The insane asylum, for instance, is a cemetery. Throughout the film, rooms are used for their spatial value rather than their practical realism.

  When I then worked with Scarfiotti on American Gigolo, I on our first day together we were location scouting and he said, "Ignore everything you see inside. Just stand on the porch here and look that way." He had seen something in the location, and that really made me start thinking more visually.

• Performance

  Performance really freed me editorially. The film has such an odd history. It was dumped by [then Warner Bros. president] Ted Ashley, and in the true spirit of the times, what happened was that Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell — which is a very interesting pair — were able to make the film doing pretty much anything they pleased. Donald Cammell was a follower of black magic. Nic Roeg, meanwhile, was buttoned down but a real visual artist. He once said to me, "People like to think Donald is a freak and I'm the technician, and we let them think that."

  With Performance, everybody thought they'd gotten a Mick Jagger film, but then he only showed up in the second half. Ted Ashley was furious about that, so the film had to be recut. At the same time, Nic had to go off to Australia to do Walkabout, so Donald hired another editor, Frank Mazzola, to work on the film. What they did was, like a vase, they dropped Performance until it shattered, and then they started picking up the pieces. They said, "Where are the Mick Jagger pieces? Where are the music pieces? Where are the violent pieces?" and they reassembled it into a kind of mosaic. Jack Nitzsche's music just reinforced that approach all the more, so it's a great film to see before you start shooting something — not only because it will liberate you visually, but also liberate you editorially as well.

• The Wild Bunch

  The Wild Bunch is just such an exuberant death of a genre. I actually wrote an article about the film years ago, where I noted that the attitude of The Wild Bunch is basically, "I know this is fascist. I know this is evil. I know this is wrong… But, God, forgive me, I just love it."

It's pretty hard to go wrong selecting ten “best” or ten “favorites” from the Criterion Collection, although it might be interesting to select the ten worst Criterion releases (something that, in deference to my friends at Criterion, I will not do). As a longtime cinephille, I'm familiar with most of the Criterion catalogue. Rather than select ten favorites I'll choose ten films that I was able to see because of Criterion, films I previously did not know about or were not available.

Criterion Collection, Nov 21, 2008

1. The Spirit of the Beehive
2. Wings
3. Death of a Cyclist
4. The Face of Another
5. The Furies
6. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
7. Mala Noche
8. Berlin Alexanderplatz
9. Hands over the City
10. Street of Shame

For LaCinetek. Films must be at least 15 years old.

• Pickpocket
• Persona
• Tokyo Story
• The Rules of the Game
• The Conformist
• The Wild Bunch
• Vertigo
• Performance
• In the Mood for Love
• Hud

...plus 38 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

• Dolemite Is My Name
• The Irishman
• Long Day's Journey into Night
• Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood
• Pain and Glory
• Monos
• Parasite
• An Officer and a Spy
• Watchmen

  Ep. 6

• The Card Counter
• Memoria
• Bergman Island
• Parallel Mothers
• Belfast
• A Hero
• The Rescue
• West Side Story
• The Velvet Underground
• Spencer

• Benediction
• Cairo Conspiracy
• BARDO, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
• The Worst Person in the World
• The Fabelmans
• All Quiet on the Western Front
• The Whale
• Aftersun
• TÁR

• Master Gardener
• Oppenheimer
• Barbie
• American Fiction
• Maestro
• Fallen Leaves
• Leave the World Behind
• Last Summer

• Citizen Kane
• The Conformist
• In the Mood for Love
• The Lady Eve
• Orpheus
• Pickpocket
• The Rules of the Game
• Tokyo Story
• Vertigo
• The Wild Bunch

I find the decennial S&S list an invigorating critical exercise. It forces one to reevaluate films and their personal importance. The fact that there are exponentially more films to choose from complicates the task but I see no reason to expand the list. Ten is a convenient number. Boundaries focus the mind. I have a few ground rules: no film is eligible for 25 years after release, there should be one silent film and one comedy, experimental and art installation films are a separate category. What I enjoy most is the mutating nature of the lists. What makes way for the new films? How does one balance a film's impact on the history of cinema with its unique importance to you? Should The Wild Bunch supplant The Searchers? Rules of the Game give way to The Conformist? Does Kane hold up? Which Godard? Why does Hud grow in my esteem? Why did I come late to Persona? Is this the year for Performance and In The Mood for Love? For years I promoted Vertigo but was that a measure of its undervaluation or true merit?

• Pickpocket
• Tokyo Story
• Persona
• The Rules of the Game
• The Conformist
• Vertigo
• The Wild Bunch
• Metropolis
• The Godfather
• The Lady Eve