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David [Lynch] said, ‘You know, you look like Ingrid Bergman.' And somebody said ‘You idiot, she is her daughter.' And that's how we met. Then David found out that I just finished a film with Helen Mirren, and he begged me to get Helen Mirren the script for ‘Blue Velvet.' He said ‘Please, can I have a phone number? I want her so much for this new film that I'm doing.' And I didn't know what to say, and then the next day I received a script with a note from David saying, ‘Last night it occurred to me that maybe you would want to play the role.' [Lucrecia Martel] quit directing, bought a boat, sailed upriver, then sold it to make a movie about how her ‘difficulties as a white, middle-class woman are nothing' [Mia Farrow] gave me a piercing look that stopped me in my tracks and asked if I had taken [the tape measure], as she had been looking for it all day. I stood in front of her, frozen. She asked why it was on my bed. I told her I didn't know, that perhaps a workman had left it there. She asked again and again and again. Far too often LGBTQ characters and stories are relegated to subtext, and it is left up to the audience to interpret or read into a character as being LGBTQ. Audiences may not realize they are seeing an LGBTQ character unless they have outside knowledge of a real figure, have consumed source material for an adaptation, or have read external press confirmations. This is not enough... Our stories deserve to be seen on screen just as much as everyone else's, not hidden away or left to guess work, but boldly and fully shown. They don't make anti-authority action films such as RoboCop any more. By the turn of the 21st century, the action genre had lost sight of who the bad guys were, arguably because we now live in even more politically confused times. So modern-day plots have become convoluted and steeped in idealism. The difference between good and evil is often a matter of perspective, and the traditional, one-dimensional villain has been replaced by complex individuals who demand – shudder – sympathy. (See Avengers: Infinity War's knuckle-chinned antagonist Thanos, who wants to wipe out half of the universe, but only because he thinks it will help to solve the population problem.) I want you to be here all the time but as a god in disguise, whom no mortal would recognise. I'm more melancholic than I was before. When your mother dies in your arms, your perception of life changes. I think the whole thing is just a fleeting illusion. It doesn't last – and if there is any paradise or hell, it's right here, right now. Also, I used to have this mental disease called collectionism. [“The Shining” movie is ] a big, beautiful Cadillac with no engine inside it... When we first see Jack Nicholson, he's in the office of Mr. Ullman, the manager of the hotel, and you know, then, he's crazy as a shit house rat. All he does is get crazier. In the book, he's a guy who's struggling with his sanity and finally loses it. To me, that's a tragedy. In the movie, there's no tragedy because there's no real change. I am incredibly grateful for having that whole experience of that baby that did not live, because it put me in touch with that kind of suffering. It just changed my perspective forever. When you've had a death like that you become part of a club you never leave, and because of the love you feel for them, you never resent it... In 1997, I was raped by Harvey Weinstein here at Cannes. I was 21 years old. This festival was his hunting ground. I want to make a prediction: Harvey Weinstein will never be welcomed here ever again. Everything that we pass judgment on as a society has always been part of the fabric of life, and homosexuality has been present through so many periods. Before the last 50 or 60 years, they were hidden, but they were there, and Stanley Kubrick knew that. He always thought of it as part of the social fabric—it was simply suppressed. He never saw it as controversial. And there was no judgment one way or the other—it was simply two men who found attraction to one another. Film used to thrive on controversy and danger. These days, it has had its shadowy corners exposed. Tastes are changing, a new morality bites and cinema's underground beasts find they have fewer places to hide. Increasingly, it seems, the provocateur is being shown the door... It's quite important not to be loved by everybody, because then you've failed. I'm not sure if they hated it enough, though. If it gets too popular, I'll have a problem. But the reception seemed just about right, I think... I do know a bit about psychopaths. I've never killed anyone myself. If I do, it will probably be a journalist. Even good film critics were asking me, ‘Why did you need to show a penis in your movie? Why do you need to show the face of the devil?' Come on! I have a penis. The guys who were asking me those questions have a penis. Why is it in American culture, the penis is the face of all evil in this world? If your dad didn't have one and didn't use it with your mom, you wouldn't be here. I thought [“The House That Jack Built” ] was so funny! Lars von Trier has a very cold humor, but I enjoyed it so much. It's like a Todd Solondz movie, so dark. All the sadistic scenes were so funny that people were staring at me because I couldn't stop laughing... I can't even remember now who said it to me, but a female casting director said, in a room full of people: ‘You have to make the men want to fuck you and the women want to be you.' When I learned that Ridley Scott had agreed to eliminate the scenes of All the Money in the World in which Kevin Spacey was playing, I sent a message to editor Peter Scalia to tell Scott that he should be ashamed. And then I immediately wanted to make a film with Spacey. His film is out of competition [in Cannes] because it is such a singular object, a subject so controversial, that this was his best place. And whether we like it or not, we are dealing with a great film and a great filmmaker. Listen. I'll never forget when I got a call from Denzel Washington to say congratulations on winning the Oscar. Oh, I cried. I got a bottle of champagne from Quincy Jones, who said, ‘You're part of the family now.' Oh, I cried again. Sidney Poitier reached out to me. These blew my mind. And then I got the message that Spike Lee gave an interview saying I'm evil… Do you take it personally? No. Of course it would look like that to him, because he was stigmatised as a ‘black' film-maker. And yet we, the entertainers who were black, were celebrated in different genres and given different opportunities. When Luca
Guadagnino says he never thought of putting nudity in
["Call Me By Your Name"], that is totally untrue. He sat in this very room where I am sitting now, talking about how he would do it, so when he says that it was a conscious aesthetic decision not to – well, that's just bullshit. His left hand reaches around, grabs my ass cheek, and one of his fingers touches me in the taint. And he starts moving it around.
I felt ill. I felt like a little kid. I felt like there was a ball in my throat. I thought I was going to cry. I felt like someone had thrown invisible paint on me. This new puritanism coloured by a hatred of men, arriving on the heels of the #MeToo movement, worries me. As artists, we're starting to be fearful since we're faced with this crusade against any form of eroticism. I am one of the reasons that a young girl would walk into his room alone, the way I did. Quentin used Harvey as the executive producer of ‘Kill Bill,' a movie that symbolizes female empowerment. And all these lambs walked into slaughter because they were convinced nobody rises to such a position who would do something illegal to you, but they do... "American Sniper", for instance, rarely looks up from its telescopic sights to ponder why this whole Iraq mess is happening in the first place. Nope, it's just good guys and bad guys. If anyone had said, “perhaps we shouldn't have invaded this country under false pretences and made a total mess of it,” the bubble would burst. Whatever you do in private is not my business. It only becomes my business if it infects the business that I'm in. Then it's my duty to do something about it. At the beginning of the show, [David Bowie] appeared as a kind of Marlene Dietrich, but with a white captain's jacket and a cap -- it was obvious that it was not Bowie playing a captain, but Bowie playing Marlene Dietrich playing a man. One thing that was astonishing was his ability to do cinema and music simultaneously, while endlessly reinventing himself. [Lord of the Rings] changed hands from Miramax to New Line before casting actually got underway – but because we had been warned off Ashley [Judd] and Mira [Sorvino] by Miramax, and we were naive enough to assume we'd been told the truth, Fran [Walsh] and I did not raise their names in New Line casting conversations. For decades, the journalists Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Bill O'Reilly and Mark Halperin appeared in front of cameras and tried to help Americans understand the country and one another. Now that they've lost their jobs after multiple accusations of sexual abuse, we are left wondering what they taught us. Queerness is merely the subtext in each of his movies so far. Luca Guadagnino's real interest seems to be materialistic: He makes swanky, Euro-set melodramas about the sex lives of the rich and immodest... It's always the same mind, the same film-maker who's making these films. So it's normal these things should be repeated. It is a reproach that's been made of all the great film-makers. Bergman, Cassavetes, Kubrick – all have been accused of dealing with similar themes again and again. As an author, you have to deal with the horizon you know, otherwise you only produce cliches. The major point to identify here is that we don't want our truth trivialized. The label of comedy [for "Get Out" ] is often a trivial thing. The real question is, what are you laughing at? Are you laughing at the horror, the suffering? Are you disregarding what's real about this project? That's why I said, yeah — it's a documentary. Caravaggio was a murderer but his paintings are sublime. David Bowie slept with underage girls . Ezra Pound and TS Eliot were both antisemites. Does admiring their poems make us condoners of hate-speech? Or do we cut this Gordian knot and view the work in isolation? The bottom line is that you can't throw out the baby with the bathwater. You can't erase history by not showing The Birth of a Nation . It's a powerful film. It should stay part of the conversation. But what you can do is show it in context. You show it with a discussion. You say: ‘That was then and this is now' – and you learn from it. I didn't think anyone would make a movie where a black guy kills a white family at the end, and everyone cheers for him. I then revealed to Rose [Mcgowan] right then and there that I was about to start writing a movie with Quentin Tarantino, a double feature throwback to 70's exploitation movies, and that if she was interested, I would write her a BAD ASS character and make her one of the leads. I wanted her to have a starring role in a big movie to take her OFF the blacklist, and the best part is that we would have Harvey's new Weinstein Company pay for the whole damn thing... Watching Sergei Eisenstein's classic silent film October is like watching the Russian revolution the same way. It's surreally lit up by stark images that sear your retina; gone the next second, to be replaced by others just as mysterious and disorientating. October is not a historical document, more a remembered dream. I sometimes wish we could see it without music, with just a deafening thunderbolt on each of its 3,200 cuts. A violent electrical storm of strangeness. That woman
[Björk] was stronger than both Lars Von Trier and me and our company put together. She dictated everything and was about to close a movie of 100m kroner [$16m]. Yes, I'll stand by that. I mean,
[Gal Gadot]
was Miss Israel, and she was wearing a kind of bustier costume that was very form-fitting. She's absolutely drop-dead gorgeous. To me, that's not breaking ground. They had Raquel Welch doing stuff like that in the '60s. It was all in a context of talking about why Sarah Connor — what Linda created in 1991 — was, if not ahead of its time, at least a breakthrough in its time. I don't think it was really ahead of its time because we're still not [giving women these types of roles]... Linda looked great. She just wasn't treated as a sex object. There was nothing sexual about her character. It was about angst, it was about will, it was about determination. She was crazy, she was complicated. … She wasn't there to be liked or ogled, but she was central, and the audience loved her by the end of the film. James Cameron's inability to understand what Wonder Woman is, or stands for, to women all over the world is unsurprising as, though he is a great filmmaker, he is not a woman. Strong women are great. His praise of my film Monster, and our portrayal of a strong yet damaged woman was so appreciated. But if women have to always be hard, tough and troubled to be strong, and we aren't free to be multidimensional or celebrate an icon of women everywhere because she is attractive and loving, then we haven't come very far have we. I believe women can and should be EVERYTHING just like male lead characters should be. There is no right and wrong kind of powerful woman. And the massive female audience who made the film a hit it is, can surely choose and judge their own icons of progress. Mike Medevoy at Orion called me up one night and said: ‘I just went to this party and I got the movie cast!' Now, of course, every film-maker loves to hear that some douche executive has cast your movie for you. And he said: ‘OK, OJ Simpson for the Terminator.' I was like: ‘Hey Mike! Bad idea! You're going to have this black athlete chasing this white girl around LA with a fricking knife and a gun? We're not doing that.' Which was fortunate, but also unfortunate in that life ended up imitating art there. If you could photograph the unwanted urine which dribbles from an old man's penis you would have a film titled Song to Song. For me, as a filmmaker, how much creative freedom I am given is much more important than how the film is distributed. Some companies did not want to invest in ‘Okja,' because it was too expensive, while others turned it down because the film had a bold storyline. Netflix guaranteed both the budget and my complete creative freedom. Whether in America or in France, not many financiers are willing to do that. There's a lot of strain when working without a script because you can lose track of where you are. It's very hard to coordinate with others who are working on the film. Production designers and location managers arrive in the morning and don't know what we're going to shoot or where we're going to shoot. The reason we did it was to try and get moments that are spontaneous and free. I was thinking today, 'Why do I hate being interviewed so much? How can I explain this to poor Darren who has to do this dastardly interview with me?' And I think it may be that I have this constant fear that I'm a fraud and that I'm going to be found out. It's true...
I didn't come from Juilliard [school]. I was just getting by and learning in front of the world. So I've always had this feeling that one day they're going to find out that I'm really a fraud, that I really don't know what I'm doing.
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บันทึก: เมื่อผู้เขียนลองเรียงลำดับหนังตามเวลาในท้องเรื่อง 1300BCs >>> Tut (2015) 500BCs >>> Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916) + Buddha: Rajaon ka Raja (2013) 400BCs >>> 300 (2006) +
Socrates (1971) Roman Emperors 100s >>> Gladiator (2000) + Centurion (2010) + The Eagle (2011) 800s >>> The Last Kingdom (2015) + Vikings (2013) + The Assassin (2015) 1000s >>> For Love and Gold (1966) + The War Lord (1965) 1100s >>> The Pillars of the Earth (2010) + Kingdom of Heaven (2005) + Robin Hood (2010) + The Lion in Winter (1968) 1200s >>> Marco Polo (2014) + Braveheart (1995) + Alexander Nevsky (1938) + Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan (2007) + The Flowers of St. Francis (1950) 1300s >>> The Hollow Crown I (2012) + The Seventh Seal (1957) + The Decameron (1971) + The Canterbury Tales (1972) + The King and the Clown (2005) + The Name of the Rose (1986) + Knightfall (2017) + Wondrous Boccaccio (2015) + The Virgin Spring (1960) 1400s >>> The Borgias (2011) + The White Queen (2013) + Medici: Masters of Florence (2016) + Da Vinci's Demons (2013) + Dragon Inn (1967) + Come Drink with Me (1966) + The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) + Andrei Rublev (1966) + The Age of the Medici (1972) 1500s >>> La peste (2018) + The Tudors (2007) + Wolf Hall (2015) + Elizabeth (1998) + Upstart Crow (2016) + Ugetsu monogatari (1953) + Kagemusha (1980) + Queen Margot (1994) + A Man for All Seasons (1966) + Ivan the Terrible (1944) + Apocalypto (2006) + The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965) + Boris Godunov (1986) + Dae Jang-geum (2003) + Naresuan (2007) + Shakespeare in Love (1998) + Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012) + Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) + How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman (1971) 1600s >>> Versailles (2015) + The New World (2005) + Gunpowder (2017) + Harakiri (1962) + Silence (2016) + The Crucible (1996) + Masquerade (2012) + The Witch (2015) + Day of Wrath (1943) + Black Robe (1991) + The Life of Oharu (1952) + Tous les matins du monde (1991) + Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) + Caravaggio (1986) + Cartesius (1974) + The Rise of Louis XIV (1966) + The Draughtsman's Contract (1982) + Nightwatching (2007) + Zama (2017) + Mother Joan of the Angels (1961) 1700s >>> Roots (1977) + Outlander (2014) + Poldark (2015) + The Mission (1986) + Amadeus (1984) + Barry Lyndon (1975) + Casanova (1976) + A Royal Affair (2012) + Marie Antoinette (2006) + The Madness of King George (1994) + Proteus (2003) + Bangrajan (2000) + Dangerous Liaisons (1988) + Ridicule (1996) + Rob Roy (1995) + Tom Jones (1963) + Danton (1983) + La Nuit de Varennes (1982) + Pride & Prejudice (2005) + Fiorile (1993) + The Death of Louis XIV (2016) + The Color of Pomegranates (1969) + La Religieuse (1966) + The Lady and the Duke (2001) + Harlots (2017) 1800s >>> Taboo (2017) + Victoria (2016) + Lincoln (2012) + Les Misérables (2012) + 12 Years a Slave (2013) + Once Upon a Time in China (1991) + The Twilight Samurai (2002) + Zatoichi (2003) + Red Beard (1965) + Gone with the Wind (1939) + Dances with Wolves (1990) + The Last Samurai (2003) + The Elephant Man (1980) + The Birth of a Nation (1915) + The Age of Innocence (1993) + The Last of the Mohicans (1992) + Ludwig (1973) + The Leopard (1963) + The Magician (1958) + Mysteries of Lisbon (2010) + Total Eclipse (1995) + Mr. Turner (2014) + Anna Karenina (2012) + Red Psalm (1972) + The Man Who Would Be King (1975) + Van Gogh (1991) + Lola Montès (1955) + Beloved (1998) + Amistad (1997) + The Piano (1993) + Waterloo (1970) + Zulu (1964) + The King and I (1956) + Nang Nak (1999) + Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001) + The Emigrants (1971) + Aferim! (2015) + Chihwaseon (2002) + The Birth of a Nation (1915) + Bright Star (2009) + Tawipop (2004) + The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) + The Searchers (1956) + The Portrait of a Lady (1996) + Washington Square (1997) + Flowers of Shanghai (1998) + The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974) + The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978) + The Proposition (2005) + Dead Man (1995) + Vazante (2017) + The Nightingale (2018) + Killing (2018) 1900s >>> Downton Abbey (2010) + The Crown (2016) + October (1928) + Babylon Berlin (2017) + Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) + The Godfather: Part II (1974) + Belle Epoque (1992) + The Lover (1992) + Ip Man (2008) + Hom rong (2004) + Theeb (2014) + Embrace of the Serpent (2015) + Maurice (1987) + Doctor Zhivago (1965) + Lawrence of Arabia (1962) + The Human Condition (1959) + Raise the Red Lantern (1991) + Farewell My Concubine (1993) + Gandhi (1982) + The Sun (2005) + The Last Emperor (1987) + Titanic (1997) + The Great War (1959) + La Grande Illusion (1937) + 1900 (1976) + A Special Day (1977) + Army of Shadows (1969) + The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) + Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (2004) + In the Heat of the Night (1967) + The Burmese Harp (1956) + Always - Sunset on Third Street (2005) + The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982) + Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013) + Vincere (2009) + Downfall (2004) + Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) + Fateless (2005) + A Matter of Life and Death (1946) + Khu gam (1995) + No Man's Land (2001) + The Time that Remains (2009) + The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006) + The Remains of the Day (1993) + In the Realm of the Senses (1976) + Rome, Open City (1945) + A Man Escaped (1956) + Bicycle Thieves (1948) + Blow-Up (1966) + Network (1976) + Apocalypse Now (1979) + The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) + Persepolis (2007) + Hotel Rwanda (2004) + The Killing Fields (1984) + Wings of Desire (1987) + Good Bye Lenin! (2003) + Longtime Companion (1989) + Do the Right Thing (1989) + Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996) + In the Heat of the Sun (1994) + A City of Sadness (1989) + A Petal (1996) + No (2012) + Paradise Now (2005) + Divine Intervention (2002) + The Looming Tower (2018) + Shattered Glass (2003) 2000s >>> United 93 (2006) + The Social Network (2010) + Boyhood (2014) + Zero Dark Thirty (2012) + The Impossible (2012) + The Hurt Locker (2008) + The Fifth Estate (2013) + Redacted (2007) + Welcome (2009) + Fauda (2015) + American Sniper (2014) + Snowden (2016) + Four Lions (2010) + The Wizard of Lies (2017) + The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) + Captain Phillips (2013) + The Big Short (2015)
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It's so ironic that here I was, utterly, utterly naked – and I felt completely liberated. Not because I was naked, but because it was my choice. Totally my choice...
I was naked 70% of the time on set [ of "Westworld" ] – 70%!” – and it was the first time I felt in control of my body at work. When I wrote my memoirs, which I think was in 2005, I thought that my audience would be women. But I got a lot of mail from gay guys who described loving my books. That was the first time I thought, Oh that's interesting. The way I wrote my book, I viewed the journey of my life through a gender lens and wrote a lot about how patriarchal society makes women feel they have to be a certain way. You know, if you're not perfect, if you're not beautiful, if you're not skinny, you can't be too smart, you can't be angry, you want to be loved. And what I discovered from the letters I got, from gay men in particular, was that they go through the same thing. The demands are you know, you're not macho enough, you're not butch enough, you're not man enough, so you're not a real man. The patriarchal society uses homophobia just like sexism and it damages people the same way. I just wanted elephants in my film ["Dheepan" ] and an image of nature moving. I don't know what Tamils dream of. But what interested me was this – we see migrants as people who have no faces and no names, no identity, no unconscious, no dreams. And what happens to all the violence they've been through? I wanted to give them a name, a face, a shape – and give them a violence of their own. It's a naive film, really. We know David Bowie, the singer, the outrageous performer, but actually we don't know anything about him. And that's the way it should be in music. When I was a child, I did a lot of stealing. And it was formative for me in deciding to get into acting – because you have to pretend you didn't steal. Sometimes I'd steal pigeons from someone else's coop. I'd bring them back to mine and make the mistake of opening the door too soon – so they'd just fly back to their own coops. I'd steal things in the Five & Dime store and the supermarket, like potatoes that my friends and I could go and roast in a fire. I like everything to follow a natural principle. People in a kung fu movie should not be able to fly around like birds. So the film should show the real limitations of this world, the real limitations of human beings. Because that, for me, is where the drama arises. It comes from limitations, not from freedom. I can't deny that I come from [José Clemente] Orozco or [David Alfaro] Siqueiros, from these muralists. All these murals of the last days of judgment – there are no nuances! There's something to be said about old age. Age helps to be free. When you're younger, you want to impress your teacher, your parents, yourself, you have to prove something to yourself. As you get older, all that goes. It's not that you resolve it. You may never impress these people in your life. But you say, “What the fuck do I care? I only have so much to live, so let me live the adventure I dream.” After all, "Rocky" gave post–Civil Rights America the great white hope that Vietnam War draft-resister and heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali had made unthinkable. Stallone's Philadelphia palooka revived working-class, second-generation-immigrant identity. This, combined with primal memories of masculine endeavor — and sincerity — restored a romantic sense of pride to a nation as broken and wounded as Rocky Balboa himself. Todd Haynes doesn't have natural moviemaking instincts; his films work out predictable propositions from a “progressive” perspective. "Carol" lacks the emotional intensity of good melodrama because of Haynes's constant point-making; his stiff compositions and drab palette betray his didactic impulse. I was addicted to erotic cinema. Emmanuelle or magazines like Playboy. They've all disappeared. The only sexy images you find now are in fashion magazines or in the photos of American Apparel. Where are those images that – as a heterosexual young boy – wanted to make you grow? I don't know where the kids find them, because if you Google for images of sex, you just get gang-bang images or art photos that are made for museums that are totally cold. There was something that was very warm in erotic cinema of the 70s and 80s that has disappeared. When people are [called] brave in regards to playing LGBTQ people, that's borderline offensive. I'm never going to be considered brave for playing a straight person, and nor should I be. In Brokeback Mountain , which I was very sickened by, they treat the wives as these weak, wimpy women. One was very stupid, and the other was a naggy, whiny wife, so you feel like she deserved it. I think people perceive straight wives as unsympathetic. They don't feel bad for us. We are never the heroes. Look at Syria now. President Bashar al-Assad is a bad guy, but are the revolutionaries good? No, some are even worse than him. It's the same situation with Gaddafi: he was bad but look at the anarchists in power now. In films, dictators are often depicted as bad guys while the people are only seen as oppressed. I wanted to show that the people share the blame, too, because they're silent. The history of dictatorship is the history of people's silence. It's often not dictatorship of power – it's dictatorship of fear. When the website io9 discussed the recent dearth of movies like The Goonies, one commenter noted that “Movies like The Goonies … are no longer possible because movies like that rely on the exploration of the world of children that is separate from the world of adults, and that world no longer exists.” That is, movies like The Goonies promoted not only independence, but also independent thought. That line [“I don't know how to quit you”] has moved, it has been mocked, it has been everything in between, but I remember coming out of that scene, off that ridge of the hill, and seeing a number of the crew, some of whom didn't even know what the movie was about, crying. When I first read that line, I was like, What is that? Now I realize that anybody who has loved knows what that feels like. The interesting part of casting us at such a young age was that we didn't completely understand what we were involved in, and that's the beauty of the movie as well. I'm definitely not afraid to parody myself. Especially since, in serious cinema, there's that tendency to surround things with a certain mysterious aura. Film-makers tend to pontificate, to adopt a rather grave, lofty persona. I'm not like that at all. I was the victim of a happy childhood and I was raised too sweet and gentle, and I had such a beautiful life as a child, and I became mad, somehow. I have this weird imagination, very crazy and sick. I come up with all these strange ideas all the time. I have hundreds. My grandparents and my mother all have the same strange sick sense of humour and my mother loves [
The Human Centipede films ], absolutely loves them. So what they all secretly think of, I create. In real life I couldn't hurt a mouse, but on screen I can do anything. There, I am limitless. The whole premise of the film
["The Look of Silence" ]
is that, through my closeness to him, viewers are forced to become intimate with him also and most viewers, I think, will feel some empathy with him, though not sympathy, which is a very different thing. And, of course, some viewers will resist that, kicking and screaming, and say, ‘These men are monsters! I shouldn't be feeling this way.' The relationship between memory and imagination is very mysterious. If you tell me a story about something that happened on the way here from the airport, you are already applying imagination to memory. And it's the same thing with the film. The one thing I always regretted about Hope and Glory is that it was based on my childhood memories, and now I have lost all those memories and can only remember the film. And now this has come along and usurped my memories as well. That scene with my first cigarette, for example, it was such a vivid memory. It does not feel so vivid any more. And what happened immediately [after coming out], according to friends, is I became not just a happier person, but a better actor. I think up to that point, I had been using acting as a disguise -- somewhere where I could express my emotions, and draw attention to myself in a way that I didn't particularly want to do in real life. Acting became not about disguise, but about telling the truth. And my emotions became much freer. I was able to act better as I think you are able to do any job. Everyone's better if they're being honest. People in the west always like the idea that someone else is racist. It's true that it's easier in Russia to run into someone who calls an African a monkey. But in London, you can easily get into a lift with a racist. You just wouldn't know it, because they'll smile at you. To portray a jihadist as simply a bad guy, who does not in any way resemble me, who's completely different, that's not completely true. [The jihadist is] a fragile being. And fragility is an element that can make anybody tip over into horror. Religions are the first examples of cinema and gods are the first film stars; they are presented as colourful pictures, are unreachable and remain the last hope. So why be surprised when film stars become godlike figures? Two loves I have, of comfort and despair, What do you think is the cosmological effect of Zayn leaving One Direction and consequently breaking the hearts of millions of teenage girls across the world? We live in the most conservative nuclear family time ever. For me, the film [ "Force Majeure" ] is such an obvious attack on this lifestyle. [ The film had three ambitions: ] To reduce alpine tourism, increase divorce rates, and make the most spectacular avalanche scene in history. One of the most painful things that can happen to a human being is to lose their identity. For men, losing our identity is very connected with being a coward. That's what annoys me when women think Tomas [ in "Force Majeure" ] is an arsehole. Because they're as much victims of gender expectation as anyone else. In our society there's a slight feeling of shame about being a man. Trying to deal with [our] basic behaviour and put it into culture today. Underneath the superficial variation, horror shows a remarkably stable structure over time. Horror is designed to freak out its audience, and because of our biological construction, there's only a limited number of ways of effectively freaking out people. That's why even an apparently super-modern film like "Unfriended" has to resort to a thousand-year-old horror monster – the malevolent, dangerous ghost – to freak out its audience. Where does your anxiety come from? We tried to force the character into a labyrinth where there's no way out. So we wanted it to feel like there was no sense of geographical orientation. At the same moment that he loses focus on where he is — he loses his horse, his rifle, and he's lost in this strange land he can't understand — he starts to lose his mind because he's shocked by the realization that his daughter is gone. We tried to sync the natural images with the idea of the main character losing focus. At the end, in the cave, I don't know if the old woman he sees is his imagination, if she's the girl or whatever. There are a lot of questions about who is who and I have no answers for them. But I think they work in the film. I cannot explain why, but it makes a strange sort of sense. It's the way I feel when you go to a museum and you see a painting. Maybe you think, "What the fuck is that?" But you keep looking at it, because there's something in it that you feel a connection to. Well, I like to think that I'm gay in my art and straight in my life. Although, I'm also gay in my life up to the point of intercourse, and then you could say I'm straight. So I guess it depends on how you define gay . If it means whom you have sex with, I guess I'm straight. In the twenties and thirties, they used to define homosexuality by how you acted and not by whom you slept with. Sailors would fuck guys all the time, but as long as they behaved in masculine ways, they weren't considered gay. If you and I knew that we had to make lunch for five people, we could have a lot of fun with that. We could serve something pretty interesting, we could shop and it's pretty manageable. If we decide to serve 5,000 people, we're gonna quickly decide to serve hotdogs and hamburgers. And that's what happens inside most mainstream movies. So you start just homogenizing everything, one of the reasons I love the genre movies I've done -- It's a mystery to me. I was in my prime. When the 1960s ended, I just ended with it. I remember my agent telling me: ‘They are all looking for a young Terence Stamp.' And I thought: ‘I am young.' I was 31, 32. I couldn't believe it. It was tough to wake up in the morning, and the phone not ringing. I thought: this can't be happening now, it's only just started. The day-to-day thing was awful, and I couldn't live with it. So I bought a round-the-world ticket and left. If you're struggling with a disease like this [ALS], it's important to feel you still matter. And it's ironic that in my deteriorated state I was able to make a film that, creatively, is everything I'd ever wished for. Of all the labels and tags and epithets people have forced upon me, there's one I don't dislike. I get called the ‘enfant terrible'. In every article, it's always there. So I have to give that a meaning. In each country, hopefully I'll find one person with a story good enough that it'll make me want to get off the train with them. I am 120,000 [British] pounds in personal debt. I took money out of my child's school account to fund this movie
[“India's Daughter” ] . Documentaries don't make money. You do them because you have something passionate to say. "Stop stealing all the white people's superheroes. Make up your own"... The turning point was very difficult. It was the highest award I got when I was young, which was the Golden Palme, and that made me realize how much expectations it creates. After that it was like, "OK, this kid from Germany got the Golden Palme and his film is very successful, now please continue doing stuff like that." It really brought me to a grinding halt creatively. For the next movie I made, only three years later, by choice I made it the most opposite film I could imagine, and that was "Wings of Desire." I thought they would tear me to pieces for it because there was nothing like it, but at least I knew I didn't owe it to anyone's expectations. Awards have that danger that they can create expectations, and of course the world is done this way -- anyone who does something successful, be it a musician, painter or writer, immediately everyone wants them to continue doing what they do. But I never wanted to continue doing what I was doing just because I knew how to do it. I think that's an incredible temptation and also a terrible trap. We got four nominations tonight, and you BAFTA are a democratic gang and your taste is your prerogative.
What is important to me is that you have awarded me this fellowship for which I am truly grateful. 'For me this is a sign of your respect for an offbeat alternative, idiosyncratic personal kind of cinema. Pure independent cinema are the filmmakers of the future. Fewer, perhaps, are aware that he was born Maurice Henri Joseph Scherer in Tulle in March 1920, and that Eric Rohmer was a pseudonym he first used in the 1950s. At the first four interviews I had with him over the years, I asked why he'd adopted this name. Because,he explained, he'd had to conceal the fact that he worked in film from his mother, a bourgeoise who would've been deeply disappointed, even shocked, by his involvement in cinema. Indeed, he'd let her believe he was a teacher of classics until her death in 1970, by which time he was one of France's most succesful directors. Inevitably, there's only one rule in this kind of movie: when you stop shooting, that's when the best thing is going to happen. Sometimes you'll be shooting something very boring, but you have to continue and persevere, because it's completely unpredictable the way things are going to go. It's happened to me before and I've learned from experience. It doesn't take you long to realize that other people forget your successes [laughs]. You read a review for somebody playing a part that you played and they get exactly the same review that you got – and you realize it's not the actor at all, it's the fabulous role we were both playing. So I don't hold on to past successes. And when I see myself in things that were highly praised at the time I think, I could have done better than that. So you have to live in the present. [ "Boyhood" ]'s theme is pertinent. While girls do their homework, conform and succeed, boys are increasingly mired in moody recalcitrance. Stepdads and teachers urge discipline on Boyhood's unruly hero. He gamely resists. Nonetheless, he ends up scoring a hot chick and looking set on the path towards an enviable career.
'Hurt Locker' made $17million because it was a little ambiguous and thoughtful... [American Sniper] is just "American hero! He's a psychopath patriot, and we love him." I started my career, thankfully maybe, with a first feature that I'm really proud of, that got some really dismissive reviews at the time. I realized I had to have a really thick skin if I wanted to pursue this. You can't be vulnerable. It's just the nature of it. Well, Aydin [ in "Winter Sleep" ] is a very typical modern turkish intellectual, and there's big gap between him and the poor people in the village. But this kind of gap between the educated well-off and the poor exists in most countries; it's not just Turkey. Then there's the fact that he's apparently not religious but writes about religious matters. In Turkey, if you're Muslim, you're not really free to write about religion - partly, perhaps, to show that they're not afraid to do so. Aydin is perhaps fairly typical in that he wants to be seen as a bit of a hero because he writes about religion, but at the same time there's a part of him that's quite cautious or timid. He wants to fight the fear he feels, but it still shows. Andrey Zvyagintsev's intriguing title [ "Leviathan" ], we are told, is both a reference to the sea- monster evoked by God in his final speech to Job, and to Hobbes's defence of the social contract, written during the English Civil War: "that great Leviathan called a common-wealth or state". I was very fond of Derek Jarman and he made some very nice films. But "Caravaggio" is profoundly boring - nothing happens. Everyone in it was busy being gorgeous. There's no character or anything. My life and work are in Iran. My cultural relation to everything, from doors and walls to problems and miseries, comes from Iran - from the language. This is not the language of, 'Hello, I need this and that,' it is something more profound, with which one thinks. These thoughts become your country. My country is my language. When I'm outside Iran, I'm comfortable and unhappy. When I'm inside, I'm uncomfortable but happy. |
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