凯拉·奈特莉

Dirty pretty thing
She wanted an agent at three, got one at six and was on telly by the age of 10. Now, as she takes on the role of Princess Diana's ancestor, she is one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Just don't ask her how much she earns... Sam Wollaston spars with Keira Knightley

* Sam Wollaston
* The Guardian,
* Saturday August 30 2008

Maybe it's because we normally see her in pretty dresses and bonnets, speaking so exquisitely crisply, that it feels strange, paradoxical even, to be sworn at by Keira Knightley. Like a spurt of Special Brew from a fine Wedgwood teapot. Can she really have just told me to fuck off? When all I asked was who she went on holiday with?

But it's not long before the next one. In the hour I'm in Knightley's company, she tells me to fuck off six times. She uses the c-word, too. Sorry, yes, this is an 18-rated interview and contains strong language from the start - a bit late for that, I know...

Knightley has a new film out, about which more later. We are sitting in a posh London hotel where she drinks green tea, and sits, like a cat, in the middle of an impossibly plumped-up sofa cushion. There is something quite feline about Knightley. When we talk about her work, she purrs. No, not literally - that would be weird - but she speaks easily, and appears content and relaxed. When I attempt to steer the conversation towards her life outside work, the claws come out. In a very good-natured, playful way, it has to be said. At times the interview feels like a sparring match, and she gives as good as she gets, if not better. She's very entertaining company, and it's fun - trying to get under the guard of Keira Knightley.

This will sound like the tragic fantasy of a male journalist who has fallen under the spell of a very pretty young lady and somehow imagines he could be her friend, but although she does speak awful proper, there is something nicely unstarry about her. Perhaps it's being sworn at, but I'm finding it hard to remember that I am talking to the second highest-paid actress in Hollywood last year, although there seems be some debate about exactly how much she made.

"According to Forbes magazine, I earned 32 million last year," she says, though she can't remember if it's dollars or pounds (it's dollars).

Is that not true? "Unfortunately, no."

How much did you earn? "Fuck off."

She says that money is not important beyond being comfortable, that she owns her own flat "somewhere in London", and she mentions a new sofa. When I ask how much the sofa was, I get the inevitable (and probably well-deserved) "fuck off".

She doesn't want to talk about politics much, because she doesn't feel confident talking about it, though when I ask what she votes, she says, "My dad was a founder member of a leftwing theatre company, I went to a comprehensive - what do you think?"

Her father is an actor, her mother is a playwright, and young Keira was brought up in Teddington, west London. How posh does that make her, I wonder. "People from the Guardian and Observer always want to know that, it's weird," she replies. "Why are you so obsessed with poshness? Somebody from the Observer asked me why I don't have a cockney accent, seeing as I went to a comprehensive school."

It seems a reasonable question, so what's the answer? "Not everyone who goes to comprehensive school has a cockney accent. I think I probably did have more of an estuary accent. Coming from Teddington, it's more estuary. Cockney is more east London."

Do an estuary accent then. "No."

American then. "No."

Can she do an Indian accent? "Not today, no. Fuck off."

But she's an actor. "You're an actor, so act [Oi, she's stealing my lines]. Give me a script then."

The new film is called The Duchess, and Knightley is excellent in the lead. It's about a late-18th century "It girl" called Georgiana Spencer, Di's great-great-great-great aunt. There are obvious parallels between their two lives, though Knightley wasn't immediately stuck by them, mainly because, as she says, she was only 11 when Diana died (she's 23 now).

Georgiana marries a cold fish played, also excellently, by Ralph Fiennes, who is really, really horrid to her. It gets more complicated when Georgiana's best friend, Bess, moves in, and they live as a joyless ménage à trois. Georgiana finds some solace in an affair with young politician Charles Grey, but has to stop seeing him in order not to lose contact with her children. It's a story of female repression, but also of female strength and survival. It's also a story about public adoration versus private misery (see what I mean about those parallels?).

Even though Knightley is too young for Diana to have made much of an impact on her life, the difference between a person's public facade and what's going on inside is something that seems to preoccupy her. "The way you can have extremely strong people who actually in private are completely breaking down. Everyone does it - presents a front that is actually... No one can ever know what's going on emotionally inside."

Is there anything of this, of Georgiana, in her? "Am I very lonely, and terribly trapped, and all the rest of it? No, I don't particularly look for characters that are like some kind of biography of myself, no."

It's a role she didn't find easy. "I wasn't particularly confident about it, which I think actually helped - because I don't think that confidence is always a very helpful thing. I really found it very difficult to get a grasp of her."

This lack of confidence is something that seems to lurk beneath the alabaster facade. When I ask if she thinks she'll win an Oscar for this role, as well as saying she doesn't think she will because it's what's known as a "big year" in the business, she also says, "I'd probably shit myself if I had to give a speech."

Is she often unconfident about her parts? "There's always an element of fear that you're not going to be able to make people believe in the fiction, that suddenly you're going to be standing there in your dress and wig, and feel like a complete wanker. Which is not particularly helpful."

It is not surprising that she mentions wigs and dresses, because a role for Knightley generally involves her putting on one, or both, of those. This has happened by accident rather than by design, she says. "I think I've simply read better characters in period pieces than I have in contemporary, which is a pity. I don't know why that is. But I haven't been kind of going, 'I really want to do another period film.' I've just been led by what scripts I've thought were good, and what film-makers I thought were good."

Knightley knew she wanted to act pretty much from the moment she knew anything at all. Famously, she wanted an agent at three, got one at six, and was making TV appearances by the age of 10. Her big breakthrough was the low-budget British film Bend It Like Beckham in 2002, after which she found herself alongside Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp in camp, big-budget action blockbuster Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl. Suddenly, the skinny little girl from Teddington was a major, if unlikely, Hollywood star.

While it may be the Pirates franchise that has brought in those millions (however many there are), Knightley is more serious about acting than to be happy simply being a damsel in distress. She's done the odd thriller and action film, which have slipped by comparatively unnoticed, but it's with country houses and the past that she is most associated - Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, now The Duchess. It's what Britain exports well, she says, and it isn't hard to find modern relevance under a bonnet. "I don't think we've really changed that much in our essence."

I'm wondering if that's it, and whether we've seen the full range yet. "Of?"

You. "As an actress? I hope not. It would be quite sad if I said yes. I've only been making films for the past five years. You change as a person all the time. And so therefore the way you perceive the world and situations, and the way you portray characters, is going to change. I think that's the aim."

Critics of Knightley say she is wooden and expressionless, though they've been less vociferous since Pride & Prejudice and Atonement. But the criticism is not just about her acting - she seems to generate more loathing, almost exclusively from women, than any actor deserves. I've brought along an example, a newspaper column (OK, it's from the Guardian). "Oh great," she says. "You're not actually going to quote me something really shitty that someone's said, are you?" Well, I wouldn't have, but she's been so totally cool, and unfazed, and also to show that I haven't fallen totally under the pretty-lady spell, so yes, I am...

"If you want to befriend a woman, ask her the question, 'What do you think of Keira Knightley?' In the resulting torrent of bile and loathing, you will bond."

"Well, I'm doing a good thing for women all over the country, then," she says. "I think that's a very positive thing."

Why do so many women hate you? "I don't know," she sighs. "Maybe you should ask the woman who wrote it. I think if you put yourself in the public forum, then that's what you put yourself up for, I guess. I don't think I need to read it. I have friends."

Who likes you? "I'm a shit person and no one likes me," she says. "I'm an absolute cunt."

It's quite shocking. Also very funny. Sarcasm is probably the best possible way to respond to what I've just read to her. Again, she wins the point. (And, to be fair, the columnist goes on to admit that Knightley can act. And the real reason that she - and a lot of others - hate her is that she is thin.)

"I think manipulation is something that women do a lot, it's still our number one problem," she says. "You look at those characters [in The Duchess] - Georgiana and Bess - and they're hugely trying to outmanoeuvre each other, but I think it's also possible for intense love affairs to happen between women - not necessarily sexual, but things can obviously take a sexual turn. Women do get obsessed with other women - whether they love them or hate them, and I think that line is very easy to cross."

The anorexia thing is perhaps the only one that does get Knightley's goat, in public, anyway (Lord knows what gets her private goat). Last year she sued the Daily Mail over suggestions that she'd lied about being anorexic. The paper ran a picture of her alongside a story about a girl who died of the disorder. "Someone saying you have a mental illness is obviously rather difficult to take, and particularly when they're blaming you for killing someone," she says. "I am skinny. I've always been skinny."

There is one "exia" she does admit to, however: dyslexia. She was slow to learn to read, got letters and numbers the wrong way round, and was diagnosed when she was six. Through support and tutors, and lots of help from her mum, she largely overcame it, and by the time she went to secondary school she didn't need extra help, or more time in exams or anything like that.

She admits she's still a crap speller, though. So I ask her to spell February. "You can't do that to somebody," she says (and it occurs to me that challenging someone who has just told you they are dyslexic to spell something is perhaps a bit wrong). But she spells it, correctly, though she makes the sounds of the letters rather than saying their names, much as a child would. Licence next. "Are we actually going to do a spelling test?" she asks, then puts her foot down. "I'm not going to."

She regrets not having been to university, has even said she would like to go some time. But that's not really going to happen, is it? It would be a bit hard, for a movie star, freshers' week and all that? "Right now, it would be hard, yes. I could do Open University." She's not sure what she'd study, though - for the time being, she's happy with what she's doing. And at the moment, she says, she's not doing much. There's a possibility of playing Cordelia in a new King Lear film, but she's not sure whether or not that will happen. For the time being she's unemployed.

What does it involve, being an unemployed movie star? What does she do? Well, yesterday she read a book - Emma's War, by Deborah Scroggins, about a woman who goes to Sudan and falls in love with a military reader there. And she watched a lot of The Wire. And in the evening she got an Indian takeaway - chicken tikka jalfrezi and dhingri mutter - peas and mushrooms. Mmmm. Washed down with a bottle of Cobra. While watching more of The Wire, which is "absolutely brilliant".

Alone, were you? "Fuck off," she says.

The Duchess is released next Friday.

吕克·贝松

In the Skies with Luc Besson and Rie Rasmussen
November 17, 2007 - 12:56am — GreenCineStaff
By John Esther

Considering the films he has written, directed and/or produced, it's not easy to see why Luc Besson and his film, Angela-A, were invited to this year's Sundance Film Festival. This is the festival, after all, that's supposed to be about finding great new voices outside of - and, ideally, who challenge - the mainstream entertainment apparatus.

Besson, the man behind such movies as Atlantis, La Femme Nikita, Léon, The Fifth Element, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, Wasabi, The Transporter, Unleashed, Arthur and the Invisibles, Bandidas and dozens of other soft-boiled titles, is about as independent-minded as the music of Oasis, the films of Quentin Tarantino, or a documentary on global warming featuring an ex-politician who allowed George Bush to steal the presidency from him. The fundamental difference between these artists and their crass commercial counterparts is the extra effort they put into stylizing their product.

Besson trekked up to the mountains of Utah to promote the out-of-competition entry, Angela-A. A neo-Howard Hawksian blend of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, Besson produced, wrote and directed this film about a Parisian, Andre (Jamel Debbouze of the excellent Oscar-nominated Days of Glory), who is so down on his luck he decides take his life. Moments before Andre does his part to fight global warming - see the Inconvenient Truth segment on overpopulation - a beautiful, elongated blonde, Angel (Rie Rasmussen), appears to rescue him. Angel’s mission is to show Andre how he needs to learn to love himself so that he can love others. (The Nouvelle Vague is Dead!)

To give this film its primal Bessonion edge, Angel performs a few less-than-angelic tasks that might render her to here for eternity. Like any other Besson film I can remember, in Angela-A, the good outweighs the bad, villains are seriously injured and love conquers the hardened heart. In Park City, Utah, I spoke with Besson, along with Rasmussen, about their film, other films that have shocked the French director, and about how various audiences respond to decapitation.




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What do you have in common with Andre?

Luc Besson: [Laughs]. It’s easy. Andre is me. It’s the story of every man at the moment in which you have to accept you are not Brad Pitt. You look in the mirror and say, “Okay, I am not Brad Pitt. And you know what, I have to deal with it.” If anything, I think it is the same for women. It comes from the publicity, the image, we have now of the man and the woman. It’s so fake.

Rie Rasmussen: They’re not 16-years-old with Photoshop. It’s unfair. No woman looks like that. Sometimes there are people who are genetically compatible - my parents were, and I’m happy, but that’s it. But if you are 16, from Russia, and you have an eating disorder, and they put Photoshop on you, nobody is going to look like that. It’s fake.

When did you have that moment?

LB: It comes a little piece-by-piece. I come from a divorced family, and very young, you think you are undesired. You have to say, “I’m here.”

Is that the gist of Andre’s arc? That people can change on the inside but they cannot do anything about the outside?

LB: Yeah, and it’s also a fact that the lie is not the solution. The more you lie, the more you go down. It’s a spiral. It’s lie after lie after lie after lie. He lies to portray an image he thinks people will like, but it’s not him, and he knows it. So what about being loved with what you are? A little piece here and there, and you understand the message. I remember ten years ago, this young actress who had so much make-up on. Normally, I’m gentle and polite, and I was gentle, but I said, “Do you mind going to the restroom and just take everything out because I don’t know who you are?”

Why do you choose to direct some of your scripts and not others?

LB: It’s if I have the feeling that I’m the best director to do it. Sometimes I write a script I really like, but I’m thinking someone younger or with more energy who has not done this type of film will probably be better than me. I did Le Femme Nikita. So for me to do another action film like that is just boring. I’ve done it. Why do one more?

This film looks like a labor of love of yours.

LB: It may be evident on this one because there are fewer shots and they talk a lot. Maybe this one is obvious, but I hide my love more in the others. But it was always there.

RR: The message of this movie is love and acceptance. Love and accept yourself. Therefore you can love and accept others. This is Luc’s reaction to the world. We need to love ourselves. We need to accept ourselves. We need to stop lying to ourselves. Then we can see our neighbors for what they are and love them for what they are. And maybe we can find a solution without violence and a little more down the lines of love? It was a reaction to this society at the time.

LB: A long time ago, this old man told me, “You can’t love the other if you don’t love yourself.” And it’s true. It just took 20 years to understand it.

Why did you shoot the film in black and white?

LB: Because the film is about the yin and yang, man and woman, tall and small, blonde and brown, inside and outside, the dark side and the light side, the black and the white. It feeds the contrast.

Do you think things work in binary opposites rather than a continuum?

RR: You need to have the yin and the yang for the complete circle. You can’t have gray if you don’t have black and white.

How has your approach to making films changed over the years?

LB: You understand yourself better. You’re more precise with what you want to say. You know your tools better. You use your tools better. Slowly you progress, but you change at the same time. It’s funny.

RR: It goes sideways, not straight up.

LB: Your center of interests moves at the same time. Your audience also moves. There are basically three shocks when you’re a moviegoer. There is one between the ages 5 and 12, where, as a child, you’re stuck with a film or two. You have another one around adolescence where you’re basically building yourself; they are films that talk to you and you just die for them. Then as an adult you can have a time of shock.

What were the films of shock for you?

LB: When I was a kid, it was Jungle Book. I didn’t talk for a week after that. I hated my parents [laughs]. I wanted to be raised by a bear and a panther. I don’t care about the mom and the dad. And The Sword in the Stone, where he learns to be a man, he has to be a bird, then a fish. In order to be a man, he has to go high and fly deep. And he has to be a squirrel. As an adolescent, it was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That was insane. Basically you’re 16 or 17-years-old and you are trying to understand the world, and then there’s this film that tells you: “The people who are crazy are not so crazy. The people who are not supposed to be crazy are crazy.” Then you are like, “Fuck.” Before that, you think you know that black is black and white is white. And Taxi Driver and Quest for Fire.

Quest for Fire?

LB: I was like, “Okay, we can make a film with no words and no known actors in a prehistoric time?” That was fresh to me. Then as an adult, the shocks are less strong, you know, too much. I really liked Little Miss Sunshine, for example. What I love is, at the end everybody loses, but you feel great. In a funny way, you’re happy for them. You say, “It doesn’t matter, they feel good together now.”

Are you as passionate about filmmaking today as you were when you first began?

LB: As a director, not so much, but as a writer, a producer and all this, yeah, I still am enjoying it. The funny thing is that sometimes I do things that I understand really clearly just a little afterward. It’s like I feel it. I don’t know how.

Lastly, what do you think about these interviews where you sit and talk about your work, do you think they serve the film or should the work speak for itself?

LB: The work speaks by itself, for sure. But we make films to share, so if the people want to talk and have an exchange, I’m happy. I need it, too. Otherwise you work, you never meet the people, they watch the film in the dark, and you never know what they think. Sometimes I sneak [into a theater]. For example, Joan of Arc: I went straight from the premiere to Los Angeles to Japan. Because I know the film by heart, sometimes when I know things are coming, I’m watching the people. I’m not watching the screen. In Joan of Arc, there is this moment in the middle of a battle where this guy’s head just blows off the guy. He is without a head. It’s a handheld shot. In the premiere, “Oh My God!” In the US, people were screaming, popcorn was flying. It was almost too much. In Japan, the theater has 1,500 people. Same moment, I turn and the head [comes off], and the crowd, “Oh.” That’s it. It’s because of the samurais. [Laughs]. “Mmm, well done.”

科恩兄弟（独立报）

A tribute to the Coen brothers

The Coens' latest, 'Burn After Reading', premieres at the Venice Film Festival next week. Geoffrey Macnab pays tribute to a pair of genre-defying, subversive mavericks

Friday, 22 August 2008

The Coen brothers' new feature, Burn After Reading, is a world premiere at the Venice Festival next week. The comedy-thriller will have a painfully topical resonance for British civil servants who've lost classified information in recent months by leaving it on the train, or trusting it to the whims of the postal service. It is the story of a computer disc containing highly sensitive CIA material that falls into the hands of two dim-witted gym instructors (Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt). In time-honoured Coen fashion, these small-timers try to sell the information.

After their very dark Cormac McCarthy adaptation No Country For Old Men, this is the Coen brothers back in a lighter groove. For most directors, making a big-budget film with several top Hollywood stars and rushing to finish it for the opening night in Venice would be a cause of extreme stress. However, on this, there have been no advance stories of budget overruns or Heaven's Gate-style meltdowns. James Schamus, the boss of Focus Features (which produced the film alongside Britain's Working Title) recalls being startled by the prevailing mood of calm during the film's making.

"It's like a dream. We started watching the dailies – and, of course, they were incredible. The other thing is that they finish their days early. When you have people who are that creative and original, you tend to assume that for them to be that way, there has to be chaos. But they [the Coens] are incredibly organised. "

Ask the brothers if they are indeed more orderly than most of their Hollywood brethren and they say it is impossible for them to tell. Ethan reflects, "Quite honestly, I don't know what goes on other sets. Part of it comes from the fact that we come from, and are still involved in, relatively low-budget film-making. A certain amount of organisation is key to be being able to operate in that world.... It is also possible that it is just a temperamental thing. Other people may function better in a chaotic environment than we do."

The Coens give the impression that they regard themselves as old-fashioned craftsmen. They claim to enjoy every aspect of film-making – from the "semi-solitary" writing of their screenplays, to production, and even editing. "It's nice that it changes. We enjoy all of it."

Their third key collaborator is the editor, Roderick Jaynes. Jaynes has worked on all their films. The one hitch about him is that he doesn't actually exist. The name is a pseudonym that the brothers first started using because they couldn't afford to hire an editor and ended up doing the job themselves. Joel has talked of the "strange, juvenile thrill" he still experiences when Jaynes's name comes up in the credits. To the brothers' detractors, this sort of skittish in-joke is precisely what can make their work so frustrating. There is a sense that they are directing films for themselves rather than for their audiences. Then again, they are defined by their maverick, absurdist streak.

"The boys live to make movies," the Coens' friend and former cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld remarked of them. "Money isn't important to them, except to make movies. They never want to be in a position where anyone has any power to tell them what to do." Generally, as long as their budgets aren't pegged too high, the brothers have complete liberty to make their movies just as they wish.

Perhaps because they are so disciplined and work under the radar, there is a tendency to take the Coens for granted. European festivals aren't always as welcoming to their work as might be expected. It's almost a quarter of a century now since the Minneapolis-born siblings made their feature debut with Blood Simple (1984). Since then they have turned out a steady string of astonishingly inventive films – Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink, Fargo, The Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn't There. Even movies pronounced by critics as relative misfires (The Ladykillers, The Hudsucker Proxy) would be considered highlights in most other directors' careers.

Not that the Coens seem much enamoured of these critics. The brothers were clearly irritated when reviewers treated No Country For Old Men as a return to the darker, richer themes of Fargo or Barton Fink after the (perceived) lightweight diversions of Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers. "It's a story that writes itself. That's what journalism is," Joel observed of the way he and Ethan are periodically accused of selling out when I spoke to the brothers late last year.

The brothers insist that there was no desire on their parts to make some deep artistic statement by tackling No Country For Old Men. "It got thrown into the transit by [producer] Scott Rudin. We liked it and we made it," they say. "There was no more conscious decision to place it into the body of everything else we were doing than that."

So what makes the Coens so special? Arguably, they are as close as contemporary US film-makers come to an old master like Billy Wilder. Like Wilder, they are outsiders with a perspective that is offbeat and subversive. He was from Germany; they're from Minneapolis in the frozen Midwest, where their parents were college professors. One of the reasons they left was to escape the cold weather. "We grew up in a typically middle-class family in the United States' equivalent of Siberia," Joel told The New York Times in a 1985 interview.

Like Wilder, they relish US pulp novels and film noir. They are steeped in the world of James M Cain and Dashiell Hammett. Also in common with Wilder, they have an extraordinarily anarchic sense of humour and an ability to make their dialogue zing. In their comedies, actors who generally pose and hog close-ups seem to lose their narcissism and learn the value of delivering their lines briskly.

The Coens' work frequently harks back to the past but does so in a satirical, barbed and even vicious way. Blood Simple may have been "a suave, taunting film noir," but it is hard to think of many old film noirs with moments as gruesome as the sequence in which a hand is stabbed through with a knife. The Big Lebowski begins in a brutal fashion with thugs breaking into the apartment belonging to the Dude (Jeff Bridges), plunging him face down in the lavatory bowl and urinating on his beloved carpet. Only the Coens could make a scene as traumatic as this appear comic.

Another factor that contributes to their continuing popularity is that their work appeals to genre fans and highbrow critics alike. Joel began his career working as an assistant editor on such films as Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead and Fear No Evil. When it comes to Grand Guignol-style violence, he is never afraid of shock tactics. Ethan, meanwhile, is a Princeton philosophy graduate. Film scholars have long pored over the Coens' work, looking for its hidden meanings. They study the references to Homer's Odyssey in O Brother, Where Art Thou? or look at the allusions to Clifford Odets and the Group Theatre in Barton Fink.

Sometimes, the knowing quality in their work can be off-putting. You admire their cleverness without always feeling emotionally engaged. The brothers can appear aloof and their films risk seeming as chilly as the Minnesota landscapes in Fargo.

When they were making Blood Simple, the brothers raised the $1.5m budget by approaching a small army of potential private investors. "It's a very time-consuming way to go, but it gave us complete freedom," Ethan noted. At first, no distributors would go near a project which so wilfully blurred genre lines, mixing comic, horror and thriller elements, and which was pitched somewhere between arthouse and exploitation. However, when it was eventually released, it was an immediate hit.

The brothers were courted by everybody from Hugh Hefner to Steven Spielberg. They had the chance to join the mainstream but were more interested in pursuing their own projects. That same spirit of independence still characterises their work today. As they put it, "We've been able to do what we want to do." That is not a claim that many other film-makers have been able to make.

The 65th Venice International Film Festival takes place from 27 August to 6 September (www.labiennale. org/en/cinema/festival/)

Come on, they're not that good...

The intriguing thing about the present idolisation of the Coen brothers, the breathless, squirming anticipation aroused by every announcement of a new project, is that even their most excitable fans (and I'm certainly on the fringes of that group) know that, as likely as not, disappointment is on the way. For every 'Miller's Crossing', there's a 'Hudsucker Proxy', for every 'Fargo', an 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?', for every 'No Country for Old Men', a 'Ladykillers'.

Their films have always been enriched by an extraordinary awareness of Hollywood history (you don't have to have heard of Clifford Odets or Wallace Beery to get 'Barton Fink', but it makes more sense if you have); sometimes, though, they seem to work on the assumption that as long as you've got your film references down, plot and character can take a walk. 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' is, in the end, a great soundtrack and a couple of gags strung together with a vague Homeric conceit and a nod to Preston Sturges in the title. The little-man-vs-big-corporation comedy of 'The Hudsucker Proxy' (1994) bounces smartly off Sturges and Frank Capra – and award yourself bonus points if you spot that Jennifer Jason Leigh's reporter is a mélange of Rosalind Russell in 'His Girl Friday' and Katharine Hepburn – but coming between 'Barton Fink' (1991) and 'Fargo' (1996), it seems tinny and heartless. Most critics thought that 'Intolerable Cruelty' (2003) lived up to its name; the fact that it was spoofing the genre of divorce comedies wasn't an excuse.

And the brothers' reverence for the past didn't prevent 'The Ladykillers' (2004) – if ever a film wasn't in need of remaking, it was Alexander Mackendrick's perfectly paced, perfectly English 1955 masterpiece; and it sure as hell didn't need remaking in the Deep South, with Tom Hanks putting on an accent. Robert Hanks

蒂尔达·斯温顿（独立报）

Tilda Swinton - Confessions of an outsider

Hollywood may be knocking on her door, but Tilda Swinton will never fit in, she tells Gaynor Flynn

Friday, 29 August 2008

Mention her Oscar win in February and actress Tilda Swinton bursts out laughing. She still finds it "hilarious" that she walked away with one of the highly coveted statues. When you tell her she was riveting as the ambitious lawyer in Michael Clayton, she looks at you like you're soft in the head. "But these awards are for actresses, and I'm not really an actress," she says, surprised that she has to spell it out. "Because the more I know about what real actors are subjected to in terms of their position within the film-making process, I realise that I'm not one at all."

Swinton describes herself as "a film fan who got lucky". Her next film, the Coen brothers' shaggy dog thriller, Burn After Reading, opened the Venice Film Festival earlier this week. Swinton plays Katie, the supercilious wife of a mid-level intelligence analyst (played by John Malkovich) who is having an affair with George Clooney's sex-crazed federal marshal.

Swinton also has two more widely divergent films due for release in the next few months. There's the Hungarian director Bela Tarr's The Man From London and David Fight Club Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, an odd little story about a man born old (Brad Pitt), who ages backwards. Swinton plays Pitt's first love in 1930s Russia. In both films the actress is on screen for all of about five minutes. Why choose such tiny roles?

"I don't choose roles, I choose people," she says. "I've never chosen a role in my life. The idea is an anathema to me. That's why I say I'm not a proper actress, because I've heard other actors talking about how they have to fight to be part of the conversation and I've never had that experience. I choose the person and then we'll decide what we're going to do together and magically it will appear four years later."

Indeed, Swinton doesn't seem to do anything according to conventional standards. For a start there's her love life. Her boyfriend, Sandro Kopp (a New Zealand artist), is almost 20 years her junior. The father of her twins, John Byrne (a Scottish artist), is almost 20 years her senior, and the two are "great friends".

Then there's her career. Most fortysomething actresses despair over the lack of interesting roles. But Swinton, at 47, says: "I am strangely impervious to that. I think it's partly because I was never going to be bimbo material. So I just kept my head down in my twenties. I had this strange instinct that I would only begin to start my real work within my forties."

Swinton started out in the theatre but "didn't enjoy school enough to enjoy theatre," she says. Instead film's "lack of articulacy" attracted her. "I've always been a huge film geek and the second I started making films I knew," she says. But it also had a lot to do with her mentor, Derek Jarman. Swinton was 26 when she made her debut in Caravaggio. Jarman cast her because she looked like the women in the artist's work. The pair became great friends and went on to make nine films over seven years before he died of Aids-related illnesses in 1994.

That relationship has informed many extraordinarily complicated performances: the gender-shifting lead in Orlando, an androgynous, morally conflicted angel in Constantine, the White Witch of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. But she's just as capable of playing flesh and blood women, like the mother who goes to extraordinary lengths to protect her son in The Deep End, or the matriarch of a dysfunctional clan in Thumbsucker.

When you meet Swinton you wonder how she does it. At 5ft 11in, with flaming red hair and skin so white it's almost translucent, she's not exactly ordinary looking, and yet she moulds those exotic features of hers into all manner of characters. Her friend, the photographer Johnnie Shand Kydd, once commented that she "can look like Dietrich one minute and Gollum the next".

"I was always a bit of an outsider," she says now, "which is probably why I was attracted to the arts in the first place. It seems to me that the job of an artist is kind of to report from outside the pale. Besides, the outside place was always where the most fun was happening." She laughs.

What's changed recently is that Swinton's edgy allure is suddenly in demand on the inside. But, as if to prove just how un-Hollywood she is, after Michael Clayton Swinton was offered lucrative lead roles. What did she do? She went off and made a little experimental documentary about Jarman with visual artist Isaac Julien. "How much money do we need?" she asks, rolling her eyes. "Luckily I'm pretty lightweight in terms of overheads. I don't have a major heroin addiction to support or any airplanes to fuel... People get so caught up in thinking that they need their lives or career to go a certain way. I don't get it." The only thing Swinton "needs" (besides her family) is her work and she's about to ramp it up. "In the last few years I've had small children [Xavier and Honor] and I've been loath to be away from them much," she says. "But that's going to change now that they're 10. I'm just on the verge of starting my life's work. Well, not necessarily with Benjamin Button, but there's a whole series of other films. Just wait and see," she says with glee.

'Burn After Reading', 'The Man from London' and 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' open later in the year

大卫·里恩《阿拉伯的劳伦斯》

David Lean and the Making of Lawrence of Arabia
By Kevin Brownlow


For many people, David Lean symbolized what is best about cinema, a filmmaker who could make films that were both grand epics and intimate, intelligent dramas.

If David Lean were still alive today, he would have just turned 100. He was born in the English town of Croydon on 25 March 1908 and, because of his strict Quaker parents, was not allowed to watch movies as a child. After considering following his father's footsteps and becoming an accountant but instead at age 19 got a job at a film studio. He worked as a tea boy, messenger and clapperloader before graduating to the role of film editor, working for the great British directors of the era like Michael Powell and Anthony Asquith. His first four films as director were all collaborations with Noel Coward, including the much beloved Brief Encounter (1945). He followed this success with two highly acclaimed Dickens adaptations, Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948). After spending the first half of the 1950s continuing to make films within the structure of the British film industry Lean made the UK-US co-production Summertime (1955), a Venice-set romantic comedy starring Katherine Hepburn. Next came The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), a wartime drama starring Lean's regular star Alec Guinness that was produced by the legendary Sam Spiegel. The film won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor (Guinness) and this success lead to Spiegel and Lean re-teaming for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), a biopic of the British adventurer starring a then-unknown debutant, Peter O'Toole. Lean repeated the success of his previous film, winning huge critical praise and winning another seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director once again. (O'Toole was nominated for Best Actor, but lost out to Gregory Peck for To Kill A Mockingbird.)

In many ways, Lawrence of Arabia represented the pinnacle of Lean's career. While Lean would continue to make wonderful epic films like Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Ryan's Daughter (1970), nothing before, and perhaps nothing since, has filled the screen with such majesty, expanse and hope as the never ending deserts of Arabia.

In 1997, Faber and Faber published Kevin Brownlow's biography David Lean: A Biography, a book that began as an autobiography told to Brownlow. Recounting Lean's many dramas on and off the screen, Brownlow's book demonstrates the endless struggle to bring one's vision to a film. To celebrate 100 years of Lean, we are presenting part of the Brownlow's celebrated biography. The following is an excerpt from Chapter 30 of David Lean: A Biography with the option to download the rest as a pdf file.

Download a PDF of Chapter 30 from David Lean: A Biography

On one of my visits to Narrow Street, I found David sitting in the garden with Sebastian, his gardener. The following conversation was under way:

"I think women are at least, if not more sexually active, more sexual than men," said David. "Men are like goats, in and out, bang, bang, good afternoon. But women really have the lingerers about them."

"But women have that maternal instinct that is alien to man, or a lot of men," said Sebastian.

"What, they don't like being treated as mummy's boy, you mean?"

"No," said Sebastian, "I think women look for a more stable situation, whereas a lot of men, because of their basic sexuality, go out and have casual little affairs."

David said, "You see, casual affairs doesn't mean basic sexuality. I think it means randy little cat. I don't really think that means anything. I mean, most women are much more deeply sexual than men."

"I don't know," said Sebastian, who was gay. "I can't really speak from experience."

"I think pretty well the whole of this creativity is sex. There's no two ways about it. And if you want to go and make a good movie, well, you know, the fact of it is that sex is terribly important. If you want to make a good movie, get yourself a new, wonderful woman and that movie will be fifty if not seventy percent better than it would have been if she hadn't existed. It lights everything up. I mean, I'm too old for that now, but…"

"Doesn't it take up all your energy?" I asked.

"No, it's very energising," said David. "You see, I think lack of energy and tiredness is sexual failure. If you've had a miserable affair with somebody, you're tired out."

I said, "But one hundred percent of your time is devoted to that picture.

How can you also have an affair with somebody?"

"I can tell you you can."

"I'll take your word for it," I said.

"You'll have to."

There followed a David Lean pause. "No, you're right up to a point. Of course you are. And you've got to have a very understanding woman, and you've got to have a woman who loves the movie that you're doing."

Barbara Cole was a no-nonsense New Zealander in her early forties. During the war she married an RAF pilot who was shot down over Germany when her son, Peter, was a couple of months old. Money was short, she had a young brother and her mother was suffering from tuberculosis, so she had to earn her living. She went into the film industry as a continuity girl, at first in documentaries and then in "quota quickies". She graduated rapidly into A features, such as The Square Ring, The Maggie and Hunted.

Married to the head of a television company in the Midlands, she started her own documentary-advertising company. When her husband began an affair with an actress, she left him and went to London. A friend introduced her to Spiegel and she was assigned to Lawrence as continuity girl.

Barbara flew out to Jordan with the camera crew. Because it was such a long flight she decided she had to sleep — even though she could never normally sleep on planes and took a sleeping tablet. All that happened was that she grew more and more exhausted, and woozier and woozier.

Arriving in Amman, it was too early to go to bed. Someone decided she needed a tomato juice.

"I drank this thing, realised it was vodka, and I was soon absolutely drunk. I thought, 'If I can stand up, I'm going to my bedroom to sleep this thing off.'

Before I could do that, David Lean walked down the hall towards me and sat down beside me. He said, 'Hello, you must be Barbara.'

"I thought, 'Oh, God, I hope he doesn't find out I'm drunk.' So I sat there and answered his questions and eventually he got up and walked away and I felt very happy. If he'd realised I was drunk I'd have been back on the aeroplane the next morning."

Very soon, Barbara went down to Aqaba where Spiegel's boat was moored in the bay. Her job, initially, was to assist Bolt with the script.

"David came on board and stood behind me. I'm not the greatest typist, and I thought, 'I'm going to get through this page without a mistake.' I managed it and he said, 'Oh, that was very good.' He little knew how nervous I felt.

"Then we went out to camp. David wanted the main crew round his caravan and he wanted my tent in a certain place. A man from the production office said, 'I don't know what's going on between you two,' and I thought, 'Don't be stupid.' In the evenings, David started asking me up to his caravan to take notes and I still didn't realise what was going on. I was attracted to him, obviously, he was a very handsome man. Then one night he tried to kiss me and I said, 'Now look, David, I'm not going to have one of these film romances. In two months we'll be quarrelling and I'll be sent home. I don't want anything like that.'

"He said, 'No, no, you don't know me. I'm a very faithful man.' Which, knowing his history, made me laugh to myself."

At the end of one of the three-week stints, Barbara went to Beirut on her own. David had offered her a lift in the company plane, but Barbara decided she wanted to be alone.

"The crew were very cross with me because David decided to stay behind and do a recce. When I got to the hotel the man on the desk said, 'We've been told that anything you want you can charge to your hotel bill.'

"I thought, 'Oh dear, here we go.' I stayed there a day by myself. Next morning they said, 'We've been told to advise you that David Lean is flying in today.'

"I thought, 'That's it. I give in.' So that's when we started having an affair. And from then on we lived quite openly for the next seven years."

Some members of the company found it a useful relationship. Costume designer Phyllis Dalton said she could suggest something to Barbara and if David woke up in the middle of the night worrying about a scene, she knew just what to, say. "The only tricky bit," said Dalton, "was when Leila came to stay at Aqaba. Everyone kept quiet."

"David very nicely said that it was thanks to me that he got through Lawrence," said Barbara. "He was a very passionate man, making love to me at night and working all day. People say that an artist is a selfish person. Well, all geniuses have to march down this narrow corridor and not put off by things left or right. Outside of work I think he was a very generous, sharing and caring person. At work, he wanted what he wanted."

Inside the caravan was a large bed, designed by David and Leila, a couple of easy chairs, a work table and a gramophone on which David played records of Stephane Grappelli and Erroll Garner.

People have been quoted as saying that David was up two hours before anyone else and he would leave his caravan to contemplate the desert. Barbara said this was absolute myth for he was a bit slow in the mornings. "He used to arrive an hour after everyone else. He'd generally given the camera crew the setup the night before, so he gave them time to get ready.

"David didn't believe he should mix much with actors socially while he was filming, because he thought he couldn't go out next morning and give them instructions. When I'd say, 'Why don't we have a few people in for drinks at the weekend?' he'd say, 'No, no. Not while I'm working.' I like having little parties, I do it all the time, but I couldn't persuade him. He was very tolerant about things that didn't directly affect his work. But if it did affect his work, then he was intolerant."

One thing was guaranteed to make David furious: if anyone walked across the freshly swept sand just before the camera turned.

"On one occasion, we arrived on location and David saw a lorry driving across the sand dune. He got out of the jeep and ran after it, screaming and shouting. But he was not angry often, because everyone worked jolly hard and did their best not to make him angry."

Barbara recalled that David sometimes did not know how to stage a scene and would get furious with himself and start yelling at the crew.

"David always knew that a scene could be shot," said Ernie Day. "His problem was finding the most perfect way of shooting it. I'd come on the set and think it all looked wonderful. And then we didn't shoot for another eight hours because they were getting it even better."

David's work was all-absorbing, which gave him an odd sense of time.

"If we were doing a tracking shot," said Barbara, "David would spend a long time peering through the viewfinder. I'd have to go up to him and say, 'Hey, David, you've been doing this for forty-five minutes.' He'd say, 'Oh, my God. Have I? Thanks for telling me.'

"David used to make me laugh a lot. He wasn't a great wit exactly. He had a sarcastic sense of humour, but kindly sarcastic, not this awful digging wit. He'd be very funny about the things that happened during the day, things that hadn't worked."

戴维·克伦伯格自述

Cronenberg on Cronenberg

It was in the mid-1970s that David Cronenberg first erupted out of an unassuming Canadian film culture, announcing himself as a bold, provocative, and quite inimitable force in world cinema. An early pair of avant-garde features (Stereo and Crimes of the Future) hadn't wholly prepared audiences for the coolly catastrophic visions and scarily sexual imagery of Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977). Each subsequent Cronenberg picture, from The Brood (1979) through Videodrome (1982), seemed to deepen his highly personal investigation into the human body and its capacities for destruction and renewal. A gut-wrenching remake of The Fly (1986) was his summer box-office smash; the melancholy Dead Ringers (1988) perhaps his first masterpiece. In filming J.G. Ballard's auto-erotic Crash (1996) he seemed almost to return to his "experimental movie" roots. But these days, in the wake of a sequence of Cronenberg films originated by other writers–Spider (2002), A History of Violence (2005), Eastern Promises (2007)–viewers cannot be so sure in their sense of what will constitute "a Cronenberg movie"; other than that the ride will be intense, challenging, disturbing.

Cronenberg on Cronenberg, a career-length interview in book form edited by the filmmaker Chris Rodley and published by Faber and Faber, offers the definitive analysis of Cronenberg's work through the words of the man himself. The following are but a selection of extracts.
Cronenberg on being an auteur director:

"At a certain point I realized that what I liked about the classic filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, like Bergman and Fellini, was that you entered a world of their own creation when you went to see their films. That world was consistent from film to film. There was a tone, a feeling, and dynamics that were consistently at work. It wasn't really conscious on my part that I should do the same, but I started to notice that what I was doing was also creating a world that had its own very specific dynamic. That's scary, because on the one hand I could say, 'Well, that's what a serious filmmaker should do,' but on the other hand it worries you because if it comes to be expected of you it can be a trap. You worry that a film will be rejected, or won't fit the pattern.

It's not unlike a child. I see it in how obsessive children can become. When a kid's turned into a cat, if you try to relate to him as your son–disaster. Emotional psychic disaster. You've crossed the line. You've done wrong. Don't underestimate the seriousness of play; the necessity to have that fantasy. For me, it's the reason for returning again and again to certain themes. The thing that would not die, you know: disintegration, ageing, death, separation, the meaning of life . . ."
Cronenberg on the shocking force of his films:

"I'm presenting audiences with imagery and with possibilities that have to be shown. There is no other way to do it. It's not done for shock value. I haven't made a single film that hasn't surprised me in terms of audience response; they have been moved, shocked or touched by things that I thought wouldn't nudge them one inch. For me, it's really a question of conceptual imagery. It's not just 'Let's show someone killing a pig on screen and we'll get a good reaction.' You would. So what?

I don't know where these extreme images come from. It seems very straightforward and natural and obvious to me as it happens. Often they come from the philosophical imperative of a narrative and therefore lead me to certain things that are demanded by the film. I don't impose them. The film or the script itself demands a certain image, a certain moment in the film, dramatically. And it emerges. It's like the philosophy of Emergent Evolution, which says that certain unpredictable peaks emerge from the natural flow of things and carry you forward to another stage. I guess each film has its own version of Emergent Evolution. It's just like plugging into a wall socket. You look around for the plug point and, when you find it, the electricity is there–assuming that the powerhouse is still working..."
Cronenberg on the reasons for making art:

"Catharsis is the basis of all art. This is particularly true of horror films, because horror is so close to what's primal. We all prepare ourselves for challenges that we can anticipate. It's only when cultural imperatives require that we avoid the discussion of things like death and ageing that the impulse is suppressed. Humans naturally prepare themselves to meet those kinds of challenges. Certainly ageing and death are two of those things. One of the ways man has always done this is through art.

I'm not a big fan of the therapy value of art, in the psychotherapeutic use of art, because it's devalued. It's like Freud psychoanalysing Shakespeare by looking at Hamlet. But I think on a very straightforward level it's true that any artist is trying to take control of life by organizing it and shaping it and recreating it. Because he knows very well that the real version of life is beyond his control."
Cronenberg on his modus operandi:

"People say, 'What are you trying to do with your movies?' I say, 'Imagine you've drilled a hole in your forehead and that what you dream is projected directly on to a screen.' Then they say, 'Gee, but you're weird. How can you do that strange stuff?' I can they say, 'You would do the same if you had access, if you allowed yourself access.' Everybody would have weird stuff up there that an audience might think antisocial, perverse, whatever. It might even look that way to the person who created it.

That's not just your imagination up there; it's a huge synthesis of things. 'He's got a weird imagination' trivialises it and says it's just a little arabesque. Nothing serious. Not the real person. Not the essence. But I think it is the essence of the person. Maybe the exercise is to deliver an essential part of you that cannot be delivered in any other way."
Cronenberg on the artist's duty to society:

"Society and art exist uneasily together; that's always been the case. If art is anti-repression, then art and civilization were not meant for each other. You don't have to be a Freudian to see that. The pressure in the unconscious, the voltage, is to be heard, to express. It's irrepressible. It will come out in some way.

As an artist, one is not a citizen of society. An artist is bound to explore every aspect of human experience, the darkest corners–not necessarily–but if that is where one is led, that's where one must go. You cannot worry about what the structure of your own particular segment of society considers bad behaviour, good behaviour; good exploration, bad exploration. So, at the time you're being an artist, you're not a citizen. You don't have the social responsibility of a citizen. You have, in fact, no social responsibility whatsoever.

When I write, I must not censor my own imagery or connections. I must not worry about what critics will say, what leftists will say, what environmentalists will say. I must ignore all that. If I listen to all those voices I will be paralysed, because none of this can be resolved. I have to go back to the voice that spoke before all these structures were imposed on it, and let it speak these terrible truths. By being irresponsible I will be responsible."
Cronenberg on God and Man:

"I've never been religious in the sense that I felt there was a God, that there was an external structure, universal and cosmic, that was imposed on human beings. I always really did feel–at first not consciously and then quite consciously–that we have created our own universe. Therefore, what is wrong with it also comes from us.

Jaws seemed to scare a lot of people. But the idea that you carry the seeds of your own destruction around with you, always, and that they can erupt at any time, is more scary. Because there is no defense against it; there is no escape from it. You need a certain self-awareness to appreciate the threat. A young child can understand a monster jumping out of a closet, but it takes a little more–not really beyond most children, in fact–to understand there is an inner life to a human being that can be as dangerous as any animal in the forest."

戴维·克伦伯格《蜘蛛》

Patrick McGrath on David Cronenberg's Spider
By Patrick McGrath

Novelist and screenwriter Patrick McGrath was born in London and grew up near Broadmoor Hospital, where his father was a medical superintendent. His novels include Dr. Haggard's Disease, Martha Peake and Port Mungo. He has adapted three of his novels into screenplays: The Grotesque (1994), Asylum (2004) and Spider (2002), the latter directed by David Cronenberg.

Spider is set in East London, between the 1960s and 1980s. 'Spider', a deeply disturbed boy, 'sees' his father brutally murder his mother and replace her with a prostitute, Yvonne. Convinced that they plan to murder him next, Spider hatches an insane plan, which he carries through to tragic effect. The adult Spider (Ralph Fiennes) is released into a halfway house. Unsupervised, he stops taking his medication and starts revisiting his childhood haunts. His attempts to sustain his delusional account of his past begin to unravel, and Spider spirals into madness.

In these extracts from an interview with Patrick McGrath conducted by Kevin Conroy Scott for his book Screenwriters Masterclass (UK: Faber and Faber, US: Newmarket, 2005), the writer describes what he learned from the vital process of collaboration with Cronenberg.
KEVIN CONROY SCOTT: Several directors were attached to Spider over the course of several years

PATRICK McGRATH: For the longest time we didn't seem to be able to get anywhere with it. Then David Cronenberg suddenly appeared on the scene like an angel and everything is light and progress, and then we moved very quickly.
How did you and Cronenberg first get together?

After he got the script in Toronto he came over almost immediately to meet the producer, Cathy Bailey, and Ralph [Fiennes], myself and my wife Maria. And the crucial meeting really was between David and Ralph, because Ralph had been waiting for years to attach a director so that chemistry had to be right. I was there, and it was clear in two minutes that Ralph liked David, and David liked Ralph, it was a great relief to everybody when we saw them chatting away . . .

One of the great things I learned from Cronenberg was he was very good at saying, 'Take that out, it's superfluous, we've already had that.' He was very economical, he'd say, 'We know that so we can cut that.' The result of which was that the script was down to seventy-eight pages and I said, 'It's not long enough.' So he then said, 'I'll film slow!'
During the course of Spider's long development process I am sure you got some notes from producers on how to improve the script. How you feel about notes, how do you deal with them?

. . . You tend to walk away and the minute you're out of the executive suite you turn to the producer and say, 'What the fuck's that all about?' And they say 'Don't worry, it's OK, you did good.' So it's a farce, Hollywood is supposed to be a profession, they make all these movies and yet you've just been through this farcical event. On the other hand you then have the situation where a David Cronenberg comes in and tells you what he wants done to your script and you listen with deference and respect, thinking, 'I'm learning something here.'
One of Cronenberg's notes being to get rid of the voiceover . . .

Which didn't take very long.
In your novel, Spider writes beautifully. Were you upset at losing that aspect of his personality, because the prose inside is head is so well-structured, so pretty?

Well no, I totally agreed with Cronenberg when he said the articulate, literate Spider is incompatible with this shambling, mumbling, confused man that we see wandering through the streets. And whereas I had to give Spider a voice in the book, that simply would not have worked in the film. You know the way Ralph shuffles about, the mumbling and the eyes–if you'd had a voiceover where he'd be articulating in nice, well-rounded sentences then I think you would have undercut the power of this almost mute figure. So I though Cronenberg was absolutely right to say, 'Let's get rid of the language.'
Surely you must have been nervous, as it's a lot to ask of the audience, to not have a very clear idea of where he's coming from or why he's doing what he does?

Yeah, it worried me but it never worried Cronenberg, he knew exactly what he was doing. And I would ask him exactly that kind of question: 'How are you going to let them know that Spider is getting things wrong here, that his father isn't having an affair with this woman?' And he'd say, 'Well, I don't ask you how you do your stuff!' And I'd ask. 'How are we going to know what's going on inside Spider's head?', and he'd say just, 'Leave it to Ralph, that's his job.' So he pacified me and then he'd get on with it; he knew what he was doing...

There was another brilliant suggestion which really made a large impact on the film, which was the notion that Spider could actually be present in one of his memories. So we put this in one scene and it seemed to work quite well. In fact, it worked so well as far as Cronenberg was concerned that he told me to put the adult Spider in all of the scenes of his own childhood. And so that was, again, a simple thing to do; every time the little boy's having dinner with his parents, going down to the pub to get his dad out, whatever–Spider is there somewhere, watching and reacting. It had the great advantage of very vividly depicting a man remembering his own childhood, and it also gave us the opportunity to use Ralph in practically every scene in the movie.
What was your internal barometer as far as trying to gauge how far the audience was going to go in being able to pick through these narrative clues?

In terms of the audience I really couldn't gauge it, and I gave that problem all to Cronenberg–or rather, Cronenberg assumed that problem. When I first saw the film I simply couldn't gauge whether somebody who didn't know the story was going to get it. I just had to trust that David knew what he was doing and got it right.

I remember there was a screening in Cambridge where my cousin lives and I asked her whether she finally understood what was going on in Spider's psyche. My cousin's not a 'film person' in particular, but she's smart, and she said, 'Yes, at this point we realize that the mother and the broad are the same one.' She went on and laid it out beautifully and I thought, 'Yes, Cronenberg got it right.' The alert audience is getting the information at exactly the right moments. I hadn't been able to gauge that.

In addition to economy, I also learned about subtlety from Cronenberg. In one scene David shot Spider's mother just trying on her slip. It's enough to indicate Spider's panic over his mother's sexuality. I'd written a scene in which he sees his parents having sex and I wanted to hit it squarely on the head, but Cronenberg thought we could just do it with the slip...
You were on the set during production. What was your role?

Nuisance, really, but I was made to feel welcome. Cronenberg is unflappable. I know some directors don't like the writer around but he was always happy to see me and there'd always be jokey stuff going on and I just wanted to watch him work. I liked the man enormously so it was just neat to be around him.

为安东尼奥尼工作

Michelangelo Antonioni: Days with the Maestro
By Peter Weller


It was in the late 1960s and early 1970s that Peter Weller–first an aspiring jazz musician, then an acting student–grew fascinated by the films of Antonioni. Weller had made his name as a movie actor–in Shoot the Moon (1982), Robocop (1987), and Naked Lunch (1991) among others–by the time he was properly introduced to Antonioni at the Taormina Film Festival in the summer of 1992. There, Antonioni asked Weller if he would care to appear in a forthcoming film. Weller, honoured, was nevertheless sure that the maestro's poor health would preclude such an undertaking. Happily, he was proved wrong. In these extracts from Weller's short memoir of the experience, published as "Days with the Maestro" in the compendium Projections 12 (Faber and Faber, 2002), Weller relates the impact upon him of seeing Antonioni's films, making the great man's acquaintance, and then being directed by him in Beyond the Clouds (1995).

[In early 1993] Michelangelo comes to LA. I have dinner with him in an elegant Chinese restaurant and invite two friends, screenwriter Mel Bordeaux and film director Mike Figgis. The communication is difficult, Michelangelo attended by an assistant and interpreter. He is in LA for a special UCLA screening of The Passenger, introduced by its star, Jack Nicholson, who owns the film. I can see Michelangelo is exhausted and looks far more fatigued than he did in Taormina. Figgis and I ask him many questions about L'Eclisse, the last of Antonioni's trilogy of modern love stories, including the aforementioned L'Avventura and an opus with Marcello Mastroiani and Jean Moreau entitled La Notte. For all their innovation, all three are simply love stories.

L'Eclisse is a beautiful excursion through the distracting relationship of a lovely upper middle class girl, once again Monica Vitti, and a stock broker on-the-drive, a gallant-looking Alain Delon in my favourite of his performances. The opening sequence of L'Eclisse is a tour de force on the end of a romance. The camera focuses on a lamp inside an apartment in the suburb of early 1960s Rome. There sits a handsome man in his thirties (not Delon) in a white shirt, black slacks, the remnants of evening wear. On the sofa is Vitti, gorgeous blond tresses falling about shoulders and a black dress. They sit in stillborn silence. She meanders as he watches her. He shaves, she meanders. Five minutes without so much as a word. But this is not midnight. This is dawn. They've been up all night. And they've said what they have to say. And this is the end. Finally she says she must go, and he asks her to stay a bit longer. But they have nothing more to say. And all of us who have ever put toothpicks in our eyes until 4am to 'get to the bottom of it' with a significant other know there is nothing more to say. And yet we don't want to approach that threshold of "Adios."

Vitti first meets Delon in the stock exchange in Rome. The stock exchange is a maddening sequence where Vitti has gone to retrieve her mother from the miasma of frantic inflated post-war gambling, when the populace was allowed into the exchange to scream at their respective brokers, like a Wall Street horse race. Delon, a stockbroker, and Vitti go through the "Come here, go away" of new love set against an opera of racism, the Bomb, and the growing assault of media. The lovers court, both aware of something missing, but what? They live in, but are unaware of, the barrage of everyday distractions. Is the romance worth the trouble? In the end they make a plan to meet at a street corner where they first romanced. They speak this plan to one another in one of the most touching exchanges of lovers' dialogue I've ever seen. They part. The afternoon passes. Images of the old and new Rome. A man gets off a bus reading about nuclear testing in the U.S. A horse-drawn cart clip-clops down a modern boulevard. The camera moves to the street corner, to an old water barrel where the lovers had their first rendezvous. Night comes and the streetlights go on, but no one comes. And the film ends. Do they get together? This is the eternal film-school question of L'Eclisse. And Mike Figgis and I want to know.

Michelangelo smiles and shrugs. "Non so" ("I don't know.") And it's not that he isn't telling. He says it like he does not know. And he'd like someone to tell him what happened! Figgis and I look at each other. Damn. Later on, in Paris, I will ask him, "What happened to Lea Massari?"–the missing girlfriend for whom Monica Vitti and Gabriella Ferzetti spend the entire movie searching in L'Avventura? He will shrug again. "Non so." At this dinner in L.A. in 1993, I don't reprise the Taormina discussion of his future film. The way he looks, it seems further from reality than ever.

[But come the Fall of 1994 Antonioni's Beyond the Clouds did indeed start rolling in Paris. In New York, Weller received a call asking him to star in the last of the four short stories that would comprise the picture: 'Nole me Tangere', in which a married man conducts an affair but cannot bring himself to renounce either his wife (Fanny Ardant) or his mistress (Chiara Caselli.) It was time for Weller to experience how a master director could convey his intentions to his actors without the power of speech...]
Paris: Tuesday, February 28 1995.

The scene says this: I walk into a bedroom. My wife (Fanny Ardant) holds a vase. I ask what is the matter. She looks at the vase and asks back, "What does a vase make you think of? Vase–flowers. Flowers–beauty. Beauty–that 23-year-old bitch you've been seeing for three years?" She breaks the vase. I tell her it makes me sad to see her behaving like this, drunk and sick. Then I kiss her and tell her I want to make love with her. She demands that I give up Chiara, which I promise to do. End of scene. That's what's written. Alas, none of this is on Antonioni's agenda.

First thing–he wants her to break the vase. "With me watching?" I inquire, as does Fanny, Beatrice, Alfio the cinematographer and Enrica. "Dio mio" ("My God"), the maestro raves. Everyone loves it when he raves. It is only his frustration with his own communication skills. We love it because this is an 84-year-old man, whom everyone had given up for dead, bursting forth like a shot in the ass for all of us. So we all shut up and listen. Yes, contrary to the script, he wants her to break the vase first, without me there. He gets up. He mimes for her to break the vase, then he walks her back into the bathroom and mimes for her to get into the shower in her slip. He wants her to sing in the shower. Then he mimes for me to come in and see the broken glass, kick it aside and find her in the shower, then kiss her.

"You want me to get into the shower with her, Maestro?" He smiles. He mimes for me to kiss her through the glass. Did he just make that up? Now I'm wondering when all this dialogue about vases and beauty begins. Michelangelo then asks her to walk past me out of the shower, for me to follow her out of the bathroom, back into the bedroom where he wants her to sit down on a stool, look at the broken vase, and begin to speak.

So: I go downstairs and wait for them to shoot the beginning with Fanny breaking the vase. I wait. I wait. At one point I noodle some Bach on a piano in the foyer. "Si!" I hear from above. Figuring they're ready to shoot upstairs, I quit playing. Beatrice jumps out the door and yells down to me, "Peter, Michelangelo wants to move the camera out here and shoot you playing the piano as if that's what you do when you come home." Okay. The guy uses everything, including my terrible piano. He shoots me playing the Bach as a kind of "Honey, I'm home" motif.

We move upstairs to shoot the meat of what he just showed us. And what was, on the page, a turgid, heavy scene from the get-go, now becomes a sort of a loony flirtation between married folks. Fanny breaks the vase. Goes into the bathroom, steps into the shower, begins to croon. I walk in after no response to my piano, see the broken vase, hear the singing from the shower, and, expecting to find a naked wife, walk to the bathroom. I pass the broken vase, wondering what went down here, kick the larger pieces away, and lo and behold, find a wife in a slip in the shower. She presses her voluptuous lips to the glass. I start laughing as I kiss her back and she opens the shower door and pushes past me through my first line "Qu'esqu'il passe?" She chuckles, goes into the boudoir and sits down. I follow, enjoying this goofy stuff, and she starts with her indictment of me with the vase speech. Which only now has turned the expectation of marital fun and frolic into a confrontation of lies.

Thus Michelangelo has extracted a subtle yet wonderful reversal. What was a one-note heavy scene, now starts off as a whimsical event, transforming into a foreboding one. We finish the second beat of the scene, me kneeling in front of Fanny as she weeps, finally pushing me away. I fall backwards and accidentally cut myself on the broken vase. She throws herself on the bed. I follow her there, kiss her foot and bite her on the ass. She bites my bleeding hand, tells me in French to go fuck myself, which prompts me to beg her to make love with me. I promise never to see Chiara again. She rolls on top of me, we kiss. Cut.

Acting is beginning to rejuvenate me. I don't know where I'm going in this flick, but I must completely trust an octogenarian speech-impaired, cane-walking romantic. For only Michelangelo knows the vision and the outcome of this density. It is his canvas, in which I am an image...
Los Angeles: Monday March 27 1995

... Michelangelo receives the special Oscar for Life Achievement. I am sitting in the apartment of a friend. The roll call of folk present (all of whom gather every year at my friend's house to watch the Oscars) represents a cross-generational "Who's Who" in movies and music...

Halfway through the Oscars, Jack Nicholson appears on screen to present the award to Michelangelo. Through a montage of scenes from Il Grido, Red Desert, L'Avventura, L'Eclisse, The Passenger and Zabriskie Point, Nicholson narrates a concise and accurate pr茅cis of Michelangelo's unique contribution. He speaks of the space, the undefined void between men and women, the place and time where speech is meaningless, where words dissolve and no longer heal, where the modern age has devoured passion, love, hope, joy, like the Pac-Man of excess. I sit next to Sophia Loren, herself next to her husband, Carlo Ponti, a quiet and erudite man, and a master producer with an immense legacy to cinema. As each film clip appears, I mutter the name of the film to myself.

"Tell me," asks Sophia. "How do you know these films?"

"I've seen them all. I just worked with him."

No!" I detect jealousy.

"Yes."

'My husband produced two of his films.'

"Yes, Zabriskie Point and The Passenger."

"I never had the pleasure of working with him," she mourns.

"It was splendour," I say.

She smiles. "You are fortunate."

罗贝尔·布列松访谈

Robert Bresson
By Michael Ciment

Once Elvis Costello said that whenever he's writing a song he asks himself: is it as tough as Hank Williams? Meaning: is it as ruthlessly pared down, as direct, as unflinching in its gaze at aspects of life I might feel more comfortable ignoring? Young filmmakers might ask themselves: is it as tough as Bresson? –Martin Scorsese, in Robert Bresson (edited by James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario, 1998.)

In October 2007 the work of the late French maestro Robert Bresson (1901-1999) played in retrospective at the National Film Theatre in London, the third such tribute the NFT has presented in the last twenty years. Bresson is a director endlessly worthy of such revisits, though his oeuvre amounts to a mere 13 features over a 50-year career. Bresson was always keen to work, but very often frustrated over funding, even within the highly subsidized French system.

Best-known of Bresson's productions are his three masterpieces of the Fifties–Diary of a Country Priest (1951), A Man Escaped (1956) and Pickpocket (1959), all perfectly-realised studies of the travails and confinements of solitary men. Add The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) to this trio and you have what Paul Schrader identified as Bresson's 'prison cycle': each film concerns the struggle of the spirit against incarceration in literal or figurative cages. Incredibly, we may contend that Bresson's later films just got better, albeit darker. Au Hasard, Balthasar (1965), a parable about a maltreated donkey, presents a panoply of human vice. Mouchette (1967) and Une Femme Douce (1969) are utterly implacable accounts of suicide. Lancelot du Lac (1974) takes Camelot as the model of a universe bereft of honour. In Le Diable, Probablement (1977), anomic youths are appalled by the bleak wastes of consumer capitalism, the garbage-dump we have made of the planet. And L'Argent (1983) is an essay on the evil of money, our 'visible God'. This, Bresson's final film, he adapted from a short story by Tolstoy known in English as 'The False Note': said note, circulated as a schoolboy prank, leads to the imprisonment of an innocent man, who is set on an ineluctable path towards criminality.

Bresson's finical style developed over thirty years and was summarised in his widely-read volume of maxims, Notes on the Cinematographer. He renounced the use of professional actors and musical score, and he disdained pretty picture-making in favour of attention to plain images, edited with a unique rhythm, and augmented above all by descriptive sound. As Schrader once fretted in an otherwise adulatory review of Pickpocket for the L.A. Free Press, 'I'm afraid I haven't convinced you of Bresson's greatness, simply told you that he hates the things we enjoy most.' But in James Quandt's compendium on Bresson cited above, Bernardo Bertolucci is beautifully lucid on the topic of why this director both daunts and delights filmgoers: 'The name 'Bresson' has become a pure word, an entity, a kind of film manifesto for poetic rigour. Bressonian meant for me and my friends the ultimate, moral, unreachable, sublime, punishing cinematic tension. Punishing because his movies are strong sensual experiences with no relief–apart from the aesthetic relief, itself a devastating pleasure.'

What follows are extracts from an interview with Bresson by Michel Ciment about L'Argent, originally conducted for Ciment's Positif magazine. It was reprinted in Projections 9 (Faber and Faber, 1999), a special issue celebrating French cinema in association with Positif, edited by Ciment and translated by Pierre Hodgson.
MICHEL CIMENT: People always refer to asceticism in connection with your film-making. It's become a kind of clichÉ . But what strikes me is the vigour.

ROBERT BRESSON: Vigour comes from precision. Precision is vigorous. When I am working poorly, I am imprecise. Precision is another form of poetry.
MC: Vigour and speed. Your screenplay, directed by someone else, would have made a 135-minute film, not an 85-minute film.

RB: That is a question of composition. I use the word 'composition' as opposed to the word 'construction'. I listen to my films as I make them, the way a pianist listens to the sonata he is performing, and I make the picture conform to sound rather than the other way round. Transitions from one picture to another, from one scene to the next, are like shifts in a musical scale. Our eyesight occupies a large proportion of our brain, perhaps as much as two thirds. Yet our eyes are not so powerful a means of imagination–not so varied and profound–as our ears. And so, as imagination is a critical element in any creative process, how could one not give priority to the sound aspect?

When I came to make my first full-length feature, Les Anges du Péché (1943), right at the start of shooting I was appalled. I had actresses playing nuns, and I said, 'If that's the way it is, I'm quitting, the movie is over.' Their delivery and gestures were all wrong. Every night, the producer sent me a telegram asking me to ensure they acted. Every night, there were tears and lamentation. They were delightful ladies and they did their best to comply with what I wanted. And even then, it was my ear, rather than my eye, which hated what they were doing. The intonation, the modulations were harder to alter than their way of moving.

Equally, I was very slow to notice that mysteriously invisible orchestral scores were contrary to the essence of film. I was slow to realize that sound defines space on film. A voice treated like a sound effect seems to give the screen an extra dimension. People who experimented with 3-D cinema were barking up the wrong tree. The third dimension is sound. It gives the screen depth, it makes characters seem tangible. It makes it appear that one might walk amongst them.

MC: Is your interest in sound the reason why there is so little depth of field in your films?

RB: Maybe–but also because I use only one lens. I like to stand the camera at the same distance as the eye in real life; which is why, in my films, the background is sometimes out of focus–which is unimportant, because, once again, it is the sound which gives a sense of distance and perspective.
MC: You no longer choose your 'models' [non-professional cast members] for their moral resemblance to your characters.

RB: So long as there is nothing in their physical appearance, in their voice or their way of expressing themselves, the decision is quickly taken. People are so full of contradictions, of oddities, the kind Dostoyevsky almost turned into a system. I enjoy working with strangers, they surprise me.

I have noticed that some directors choose non-professional actors and then get them to act. But you saw that in L'Argent no one acts. That's why it seems so fast. What they say is not what matters...

I am never disappointed by my models. They always give me something new, that I would not have been able to think up and which suits my purpose. In any case, I believe in accidents, happy accidents...
MC: In your Notes on the Cinematographer, you write in big letters 'ORDER AND DISORDER AT A RESPECTFUL DISTANCE', which relates to your method in that you prepare everything very meticulously, and then leave room for accident.

RB: Shake the tree, as Charlie Chaplin used to say. Not too much, in my opinion. You need a bit of disorder, because it is real鈥�
MC: All your films are about a collision between predestination and free-will, between chance and necessity.

RB: Which is how we are. Three times out of four, chance governs us. And our will is absorbed by predestination...
MC: You've never used a writer, except for your first two films which were written by Giraudoux and Cocteau, no less!

RB: I owe them a great deal. Afterwards, I was in a position to be sole craftsman. But at first, I had to find help. Giraudoux worked with me and I was overawed, like a schoolboy. I'd say, 'It ought to be something like this', and he would obey–he worked terribly fast. I'd laboriously written three quarters of the dialogue for Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1946) when I asked Cocteau for help. Then Cocteau solved all my problems in an hour and a half, scribbling on the corner of a tablecloth in his apartment.
MC: You emphasize what differentiates your film-making and theatre. But you, who are a painter and were born to paint, do not believe that there is any kind of competition between cinema and fine art.

RB: I love theatre. But I do not believe that cinema ought to be photographing theatre, nor is it a synthesis of all the other arts. I like to quote Stendhal, who said, 'The other arts taught me the art of writing.' That's what I tell young people. One must acquire an eye and an ear.
MC: Your pictures have a strong plastic quality but they never put one in mind of painting. Are you not concerned that cinema might be contaminated by painting?

RB: No. If I ever think of painting, it is as a means of escape. I mean escaping picture postcards. That is not the reason I forego my painterly eye when composing pictures for films. You will have noticed that in L'Argent there are a series of close-ups whose only function is to add sensation. When the father, a piano-player, drops a glass, his daughter is in the kitchen. Her dustpan and sponge are ready. I do not then enter the room, but cut immediately to a close shot which I like very much, the wet floor with the sound of the sponge. That is music, rhythm, sensation. I am going to show a man entering a room, like in the theatre, or in most films. Only a door handle turning. You will have noticed, too, that the protagonist is not immediately described. First his legs are seen, then his back, then a three-quarter profile, then suddenly, walking alone, he reveals himself...

When I started out, with Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, I was after something different, a kind of coherence, that's all. Nowadays, I show a basketful of potatoes as an old lady picks them, not her face. There's no need, because immediately after we see her doing something much more significant, when she stands up and is about to leave.

MC: You say you are a jolly pessimist, but your recent films are more sombre than Pickpocket or A Man Escaped, which culminated in a kind of jubilation.

RB: I am sorry that in L'Argent I was unable to linger on Yvon's redemption, on the idea of redemption, but the rhythm of the film, at that stage, would not stand for it. Perhaps I do see the world more sombrely than I used to, unintentionally. There is something to that.
MC: You rarely commission film music, preferring classical composers like Mozart, Lully, Monteverdi, Schubert or Bach.

RB: That is of no importance now that I have completely done away with atmospheric music in my films. It took me a long time to see how nefarious it was, particularly if it is glorious music. Immediately, it makes the images seem flat; whereas a sound effect will give them depth.
MC: Which of your films are you most satisfied with?

RB: I don't know. I never see them again, or almost never. I got joy from all of them, while they were being made. Some, like Pickpocket, were made fast and easily. I like the way it moves, and the way one scene moves into the next. Au Hasard, Balthazar has got some providential moments in it, as well as some flaws. It takes a series of unplanned, mad coincidences to make the impossible come right. In Quatre Nuits d'un Rêveur, I like the theme: 'Love is illusion, so let's get on with it!' That's hardly pessimistic. But no film is perfect.
MC: Can you picture your film before you make it?

RB: Yes, and I carry on picturing it and hearing it all the time I am shooting it, as it comes to life. I do not aim for purity, nor to reproduce the ascetic quality of the screenplay. That is not the point. The trouble is that one cannot conceive of things in disorder. One cannot see a single leaf on a tree. In order to gain an impression of something, one must let one's spirit strip away all that prevents one from grasping it. If an image is over-burdened, it will not follow on smoothly from the previous image. There must be a notion of simplicity.
MC: Which stage do you like best? Writing? Shooting? Or cutting?

RB: The hardest is writing on paper. You sit there between four walls, filled with doubt... Now, I've changed my method. I write as I walk down the street, or swimming in the sea. Then I take notes. During a shoot the trouble is that you have to move fast. The crew is astonished that sometimes I may have to stop for ten or fifteen minutes to have a think. Years ago, in Italy, where oddly I never managed to make a film, there were some directors, I remember, who would say–and no one thought this was odd–'I am not inspired today, I'm off.' Wonderful. But if I pace up and down, if I change angles, everyone seems surprised. All because cinema lives off pre-production. Everything is settled in advance. Everyone knows what angle has got to be shot, in what corner of the studio, because it usually is in a studio. And the result is a mish-mash of realism and the lack of it. The magic is in the cutting-room, when suddenly images and sounds align. Life comes to life. From start to finish, films are a series of births and resurrections. What lies dead on paper is reborn during the shoot, and dead images are reborn in the cutting-room. That is our reward...

维姆·文德斯谈安东尼奥尼

Wenders on Antonioni
By Wim Wenders

In Memoriam: Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007)

Michelangelo Antonioni died in Rome on July 30 2007, at the age of 94. The body of work he left behind is unquestionably one of the great glories of international cinema since the Second World War. By the 1990s Antonioni's directing career was widely believed to have been more or less finally curtailed by the effects of a stroke that left him barely able to speak. But in 1994 Wim Wenders, a passionate admirer of Antonioni's work, agreed to assist and 'back-stop' the production of Beyond the Clouds, a portmanteau film that Antonioni had adapted from several of his short stories and sketches. In due course Wenders would write a diary of his extraordinary experience on the film, published in English (and translated by the poet Michael Hofmann) as My Time with Antonioni (Faber and Faber, 2000.) In this extract from the book's opening, Wenders recalls the powerful effect of his first encounter with the maestro, then on the cusp on his seventieth birthday.

I first met Michelangelo Antonioni in 1982 in Cannes, where he was showing his film Identificazione di una donna. I had brought Hammett to the film festival, and was impressed with Antonioni's new film as I had been by Blow-up or Zabriskie Point or, before that, by L'Avventura, La Notte or L'Eclisse.

As part of a documentary I was making on the development of film language, I had invited all the directors present at Cannes to speak to camera on the future of the cinema as they saw it. Many of them had taken up my invitation, among them Werner Herzog, Rainer Fassbinder, Steven Spielberg, Jean-Luc Godard and–Antonioni. Each director was left by himself in a room with a Nagra tape-recorder, a 16 mm camera and some brief instructions. Each was free to 'direct' his reply to the question I put to them all; they could be brief, or if they liked they could use up the whole reel of film, roughly ten minutes. The finished film was called Chambre 666, after the room in the Hotel Martinez where it had all taken place. It was the last available hotel room in the whole of Cannes.

For me, the most impressive statement on the future of the cinema was that of Michelangelo Antonioni, which is why it went into the film completely unedited, including the moment when Michelangelo had finished speaking, and walked over to the camera to switch it off.

What he said was this:

"It's true, film is in grave danger. But we shouldn't overlook other aspects of the problem. The effect of TV on people's viewing habits and expectations–especially children's–is clear. On the other hand, we can't deny that part of the reason that the situation seems so grave to us is because we belong to an older generation. What we should do is try to adapt to the different visual technologies that are coming into being.

"New forms of reproduction such as magnetic tape will probably come to replace traditional film stock, which no longer meets our needs. Scorsese has already pointed out that some older colour films have begun to fade. The problem of entertaining ever-larger numbers of people may be solved by electronics, by lasers, or by other technologies still to be discovered–who can say? Of course, I'm just as worried as anyone else about the future of the cinema as we know it. We're attached to it because it gave us so many ways of saying what we felt and thought we had to say. But as the spectrum of new technical possibilities gets wider, that feeling will eventually disappear. There probably always was that discrepancy between the present and the unimaginable future. Who knows what houses are going to look like in future–the structures we see when we look out of the window probably won't even exist tomorrow. We shouldn't think of the immediate future either, but of the distant future; we must concern ourselves with the kind of world that a future race of humans will inhabit.

"I'm not such a pessimist. I've always been someone who tried to adapt to whatever forms of expression coped best with the contemporary world. I've used video on one of my films; I've experimented with colour, and I've painted reality. The technique was crude, but it represented some kind of advance. I want to go experimenting, because I believe that the possibilities of video will give us a different sense of ourselves.

"It's not an easy thing, to talk about the future of cinema. High-definition video cassettes will soon bring it into our houses; cinemas probably won't be needed any more. All our contemporary structures will disappear. It won't be quick or straightforward, but it will happen, and we can't do anything to prevent it. All we can do is try to adjust to it.

"Already in Deserto rosso, I was looking at the question of adapting–adapting to new technologies, to the polluted air we'll probably have to breathe. Even our physical bodies will probably evolve–who can say in what ways. The future will probably present itself with a ruthlessness we can't yet imagine. I'm only going to repeat myself now; I'm not a philosopher or a speech-maker. I'd rather work and try things out than talk about it. My sense is: it won't be all that hard to turn us into new people, better used to dealing with the new technologies."

It wasn't just the statement that impressed me, it was Antonioni himself–his confident yet unassuming way of talking, his movements, the way he walked up and down in front of the camera, and stood by the window. The man was as cool and stylish as his work, and his outlook was every bit as radical and modern as the films he made.