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 WELCOME

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WELCOME | CLASSIC FILM

 CONTENTS

THIS FEELS
EXACTLY LIKE
WHAT I HAD
IN MY HEAD
WHEN I WAS
WRITING IT’
PHILIP K. DICK

62
CLASSIC FILM | CONTENTS
 CONTENTS

Contents
EARLY CINEMA
06 THE BEGINNING

1950s
12 THE 1950S
18 MARILYN MONROE

1960s
22 THE 1960S
18 28 PSYCHO 104
1970s
34 THE 1970s
40 AL PACINO 

44 THE WARRIORS
48 JODIE FOSTER
52 JAWS

1980s
56 THE 1980s
62 BLADE RUNNER
68 BLADE RUNNER 2049
70 FATAL ATTRACTION
76 JOHN CARPENTER
28 80 FULL METAL JACKET 120
1990s
86 THE 1990s
92 ROBIN WILLIAMS
96 TOY STORY
100 TIM BURTON
104 AMERICAN BEAUTY

2000s
110 THE 2000s
116 SAMUEL L JACKSON
120 ETERNAL SUNSHINE
0F THE SPOTLESS MIND

52 126 INTERVIEWS 126

CONTENTS | CLASSIC FILM



CLASSIC FILM | EARLY CINEMA

 EARLY
CINEMA 

THE FIRST HALF-CENTURY OF MOVING

PICTURES SAW RAPID ARTISTIC AND
TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT
WORDSPHILIPKEMP

EARLY CINEMA | CLASSIC FILM

 EARLY CINEMA
T
he year 1895, it’s generally agreed, is when it all started, with
the Lumière brothers’ Workers Leaving The Lumière Factory
shown to a paying public on 28 December of that year. So –
the debut of filmed documentary. But within a few months
Georges Méliès, a stage conjuror by profession, was luring
customers into Le Manoir Du Diable, with Méliès himself
playing Satan – mischievous poetry to the Lumières’ sober
prose. Fact and fiction: already cinema was launched on its
double trajectory.
Initially, films were no more than a few minutes long, and
2
tucked in among other attractions – plays, dancing, acrobats,
whatever – in theatres and music halls. But gradually, as the
public appetite for the “moving pictures” spread and

intensified, dedicated movie houses sprang up and the length
of films steadily increased. Less than two decades after the
Lumières’ pioneering venture, film production was underway
in all the major European countries, the USA, Canada, India,
Japan, Turkey, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Australia, and in
several of those countries was supported by a substantial
industry. The appeal was universal.
Soon cinematic comedy was well established, along with
fantasy, costume drama, romance, thrillers, horror, war
movies, Westerns, animation, ancient world epics and even
pornography – virtually every genre we now know, even if in
primitive form. It didn’t take long, either, for filmmakers to
discover the manifold tricks that the camera could play:
close-ups, panning shots, slow motion, speeded-up motion,
freeze-frames, fades, dissolves and double-exposure all
showed up in these early years, as did flashbacks and
flash-forwards, parallel editing (simultaneous action in
different venues), subjective shots and dream sequences.
1
CLASSIC FILM | EARLY CINEMA
Early film actors were anonymous – partly because the
new medium was seen as vulgar and might damage their
stage reputations. But as faces became familiar, the public
clamoured to know more about their heroes and heroines.
Florence Lawrence (“The Biograph Girl”) was the first named
star in 1909, but others soon followed, among them Mary
Pickford, Max Linder, Lillian Gish, Dustin Farnum and
Douglas Fairbanks. And in January 1914 a young British
vaudeville artist stepped before a movie camera for the first
time. By the end of that year Charlie Chaplin was the most
widely recognised person in the world.
Movies gradually gained status and respectability. Feted
stage actors such as Sarah Bernhardt lent their presence on
screen. For its historical drama L’assassinat Du Duc De Guise
(1908), the Société Film d’Art invited the eminent 73-year-
old classical composer, Camille Saint-Saëns, to compose the
first ever specially commissioned film score. And while the
majority of movies were still one- or two-reelers, films were
growing longer. In 1914 Cecil B. DeMille, setting up shop in
an obscure suburb of LA called Hollywood, made his debut
effort, a Western called The Squaw Man. It ran to 74 minutes.
Serials were hugely popular, too, usually centred round
the exploits of mysterious master-criminals. Louis Feuillade
led the pack, with his multi-part Fantômas (1913-14), Les
Vampires (1915-16) and Judex (1916). His thrillers, still gripping
to watch, much influenced subsequent filmmakers such as
Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, and even – via the comic-books
– today’s superhero movies. The US followed suit with The
Perils Of Pauline (1914), featuring sweet innocent Pearl White
at the mercy of assorted villains.
The ancient-world movie epic came to birth in Italy.
Mario Caserini’s The Last Days Of Pompeii (1913) ran to
90 minutes, but was dwarfed by Giovanni Pastrone’s
148-minute Cabiria (1914), set in and around 3rd-century BC
Carthage and taking in massive sets, teeming battle scenes,
and Hannibal’s elephants crossing the Alps. D.W. Griffith
REX
took one look and decided to outdo Pastrone with The Birth
 1895-1950

10  
Films From
Early Cinema
1 THETRIPTOTHEMOON
Primitivesci-fiPinchingaplotfromJulesVerne andaddinghis
owncheerfulbrandoffarce Mélièstakesabunchoftop-hatted
venturersofftomeetthecapering insect-parrotmoonpeople
3

 
2 THEGREATTRAINROBBERY

ProbablythefirstWestern introducingmanyofthekey
elements–thehold-up thegunfight thepursuingposseAnd
certainlythefirsttohaveagunfiredstraightintothecamera

 
3 THEBIRTHOFANATION
Atoncedespicableandmagnificent DWGriffith’sepicof
the CivilWaranditsaftermathisatoweringmilestoneofthecinema
–andaracistglorificationoftheKuKluxKlan 4

 
4 LESVAMPIRES
InLouisFeuillade’sfinestserial madeof“episodes”
releasedfromNovembertoJune heroicParisianreporter
Guérandebattlestheevilforcesofthemysteriousgangknownas
Les Vampires–andespeciallytheslinkyfemmefatale IrmaVep

 
5 NOSFERATU
Thefirst–andstillbysomewaythescariest–adaptationof
theDraculastory withMaxSchreckchillinglygrotesqueasthe
cadaverous bloodsuckingCountOrlokCompletelyunofficial of
course hencethenamechange
5

country with just the intertitles translated, with music

PUBLIC APPETITE FOR THE provided with anything from a single jangly piano to a full
symphony orchestra – or the much-loved cinema organ.


‘MOVING PICTURES’ SPREAD
AND INTENSIFIED
H_y:GZmbhg (1915) and Intolerance (1916). He in turn was
trumped a decade later by Abel Gance’s massive GZiheÂhg
(1927), all seven-and-a-half hours of it.
Before WW1 Hollywood was yet to gain its ascendancy
over world cinema, and European filmmakers, especially in
France, Italy and Denmark, made much of the running. In
1907, of the 1,200 films released in the US only 400 were
American-made. All this changed after the war: with
European nations still groggy from the conflict, the nascent
US industry, lavishly funded and established on the West
Coast, seized its chance. From the early 1920s onwards,
Hollywood dominated, both within and outside the USA.
The “majors” (MGM, Paramount, 20th Century Fox,
Columbia, Warner Bros, Universal and RKO) established
vertical integration: they not only made the films, they also
controlled most of the distribution and exhibition chains.
Studio heads like Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner and Harry
Cohn governed all aspects of production; most directors,
screenwriters and actors worked under contract.
The star system (MGM famously boasted of having “more
stars than there are in heaven”) sent the carefully-nurtured
images of Theda Bara and Clara Bow, Douglas Fairbanks and
Rudolph Valentino, around the world fans aped their
gestures, mannerisms and costumes. Clara Bow’s flapper in
It (1927) – “It” meaning sex appeal – and Fairbanks’s
swashbuckling hero in The Thief Of Bagdad (1924) became role
models for millions. The comedy of Chaplin, Buster Keaton
and Harold Lloyd diverted audiences everywhere. The
absence of sound meant that films could be screened in any
Though Hollywood took the lion’s share, other countries
were forging ahead. German silent cinema took visual
artistry to new heights – and depths – exploring
psychological and aesthetic avenues that the US industry,
always aiming to maximise audience numbers, would shy
away from. Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari (1920),
with its stylised, expressionist sets and feverish acting, first
alerted the world to the distinctive German take on a
distorted world, and was soon followed by the masterworks
of Fritz Lang (Destiny, 1921; Dr. Mabuse, 1922; =b^Gb[^eng`^g,
1924; Metropolis, 1927), F.W. Murnau (Ghl_^kZmn, 1922; The
EZlmyEZn`a, 1924; Faust, 1926) and G.W. Pabst (Joyless Street,
1925; L^\k^mlH_:Lhne, 1926; Pandora’s Box, 1929). Much
admired by international arthouse audiences, they created
a dark, haunted style that, two decades later, would feed
into American film noir.
n Russia, the optimistic energy unleashed by the
I 1917 Revolution found expression in the work of
young filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod
Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko and Dziga Vertov.
The kinetic power of their films, the dynamic imagery and
radical, assertive use of montage was put at the service of the
Soviet state in works like Eisenstein’s Strike and Battleship
Potemkin (both 1925), Pudovkin’s Mother (1926), Dziga
Vertov’s FZgPbma:Fhob^<Zf^kZ (1929) and Dovzhenko’s
:kl^gZe(1929). But at the start of the ’30s the dead hand of
Stalinist orthodoxy crushed Soviet cinema’s innovative
initiatives, and the spark was extinguished.
Similarly in Germany, where Hitler’s accession to power
in 1933 led to the suppression or exile of the industry’s
leading talents, many of them Jewish. French cinema,
though, entered a classic decade, with Jean Renoir attaining
his greatest period (;hn]nLZnoÂ=^l>Znq, 1932; Le Crime De

EARLY CINEMA | CLASSIC FILM

 EARLY CINEMA
10 Films From Early
Cinema cont...
 
6 THEGENERAL
Keaton’smasterpieceofsilentcomedy withBusterasthe
Civil-WareraConfederatetrain-driverpursuingtheNortheners
who’vehijackedhislocomotiveThegagsaresheerpoetry

 
7 M

Inhisfirstmajorrole PeterLorreisatoncepitiableand
repellentasthepudgy pop-eyedchild-killerbeinghunteddown
bytheBerlinunderworld–sincehe’sbadforbusiness

 
8 BRINGINGUPBABY

Screwballatitsscrewiest withKatharineHepburn’sditsy
socialitesettinghersightsonCaryGrant’sstuffyacademic–
withthehelpofacastofeccentricsandherpetleopard Baby

 
9 DOUBLEINDEMNITY
Wilderlaysdownanenduringtemplateinthiscynicalnoir
dramaastrash-blonde calculatingBarbaraStanwyckseductively
suckersbiglugFredMacMurrayintobumpingoffherhusband

 
10 KINDHEARTSANDCORONETS
Ealingcomedyatitsblackestandbest withAlec
Guinnessinavirtuosoeightfoldroleasthewholearistocratic
clanthatsuaveserialkillerDennisPriceplanstoeliminate

F'yEZg`^, 1936; La Grande Illusion, 1937; La Règle Du Jeu, 1939).
Alongside him there was the tragically short-lived Jean Vigo
(SÂkh=^<hg]nbm^, 1933; Eƅ:mZeZgm^, 1934); René Clair (Sous Les
Toits De Paris, 1930; :GhnlEZEb[^kmÂ, 1931 – both making
ingeniously original use of sound); Jacques Feyder (Pension
Mimosas, 1935); Julien Duvivier (IÂiÂE^Fhdh, 1937); and the
writer-director team of Jacques Prévert and Marcel Carné,
creators of “poetic realism” with Quai Des Brumes (1938) and
E^yChnkL^EÁo^ (1938). Internationally recognised French stars
were created: Jean Gabin, Arletty, Fernandel, Françoise
Rosay, Charles Vanel and Michèle Morgan.
British cinema took a while to get its act together. In the
1920s the overall level was depressingly low, but around the
middle of the decade the name of Alfred Hitchcock began to
be noised abroad, especially after his early forays into
suspense: The Lodger (1927) and his first sound movie,
Blackmail (1929). In 1934 he hit his stride with a string of
increasingly accomplished suspense movies, starting with
The Man Who Knew Too Much.
But with the arrival of sound, the ’30s were the Golden
Decade of Hollywood. Comedies and musicals, romantic
dramas and gangster movies, costume dramas and
biopics, thrillers and horror movies, epics and war
movies, swashbucklers and Westerns: the
great studio system of the Dream Factory
churned out all of these and more. Cycles came
and went. Early in the decade tough gangster movies
were in vogue, perhaps the legacy of Prohibition and the
Great Crash of 1929: Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1931),
William Wellman’s Ma^In[eb\>g^fr (1931) and Howard
Hawks’ Scarface (1932) made stars of, respectively, Edward
G. Robinson, James Cagney and Paul Muni. At the same
time – and possibly reflecting similar social
traumas – audiences were chilled by a string
of archetypal horror movies: Dracula (1931), Frankenstein
(1931), The Mummy (1932) and Tod Browning’s compassionate
circus-horror, Freaks (1932). King Kong (1933) might fit into
the same pattern, too.
Countering such pessimism, comedy thrived. >fb`kÂl
like Ernst Lubitsch, one of the many European filmmakers
and actors who gravitated to Hollywood, made sophisticated
comedies like Trouble In Paradise (1932) that teased the
puritanical dictates of the Hays Code. Less cynical and more
romantic was another European import, Rouben Mamoulian
(Love Me Tonight, 1932). Screwball comedy – fast-talking
zany farces, generally involving class-conflict and the battles
of the sexes – kicked off with Frank Capra’s It Happened One
Gb`am (1934) and reached its apogee with Howard Hawks’s
Bringing Up Baby (1938). Even crazier were the anarchistic
films of the Marx Brothers, at their greatest in the Ruritanian
farce of Duck Soup (1933), their last for Paramount before they
ill-advisedly moved to the taming confines of MGM. Slapstick
still held sway with the lovable duo of Laurel and Hardy.
At Warner Bros the musicals of choreographer-turned-
director Busby Berkeley (42nd Street, Gold Diggers Of 1933)
deployed massed battalions of chorus girls in kaleidoscopic
patterns – erotic, vulgar and stupendously watchable.
More subtle in their terpsichorean appeal were the films
starring the graceful team of Fred Astaire and Ginger
Rogers: Top Hat (1935), Swing Time (1936); and also moving
with grace, though in a rather different register, the
Tasmanian-born swashbuckler Errol Flynn, successor to
Douglas Fairbanks, often teamed with Olivia de Havilland
in costume dramas that ranged from the Caribbean
(<ZimZbgy;ehh], 1935) to Sherwood Forest (Ma^:]o^gmnk^l
H_yKh[bgAhh], 1938).
In this decade the Hollywood star system achieved
empyrean heights. Some silent stars – John Gilbert,

CLASSIC FILM | EARLY CINEMA

6
 8
9 10
Norma Talmadge – saw their careers sunk by the coming of
sound, their voices found weak or inappropriately accented.
But the faces of Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Katharine
Hepburn, Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy, Barbara
Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Bette Davis, Cary Grant – yes, and
cutesy little Shirley Temple – became known around the
world; fan clubs worshipped them, movie magazines related
their supposed doings in painstaking detail.
alt Disney had created Mickey Mouse in
W 1928. Throughout the ’30s Disney shorts
grew ever more elaborate and ambitious; his
plan to make the first-ever animated feature
was mocked as “Disney’s folly”. But Snow White (1937)
scored a smash-hit, and was soon followed by Pinocchio
(1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).
Warner Bros, less ambitious – or less reverential – countered
with wisecracking rabbit Bugs Bunny and his inept hunter
Elmer Fudd.
Hollywood loved to think big, whether in Cecil B. DeMille
old-world epics (Cleopatra, 1934; The Crusades, 1935) or, with
the added glory of colour, in the Civil War battle scenes of
Gone With The Wind (1939). But the world was shrinking and
darkening with the onset of war. Film noir is often linked to
the outbreak of WW2, with America’s sense of being drawn
into the conflict, and then afterwards to the anti-Communist
paranoia of the Cold War. John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon
(1941), with Humphrey Bogart the archetypal hard-boiled PI,
set the shadowy style that others followed: Hitchcock, now
firmly established in the US, with LaZ]hpH_:=hn[m(1943);
Billy Wilder with Double Indemnity (1944); Otto Preminger
with Laura (1944); the protean Howard Hawks with The Big
Sleep (1946); Orson Welles’s The Lady From Shanghai (1947);
and many more, until the cycle wound down in the late ’50s.
AUDIENCES WERE CHILLED
BY A STRING OF ARCHETYPAL
HORROR MOVIES
The darkness of noir seeped abroad, too, finding its way
into the finest British film yet made: Carol Reed’s The Third
Man (1949) set in war-shattered Vienna, scripted by Graham
Greene and with Orson Welles in the title role. British
cinema had found its identity during the war, when a tiny
studio on the western outskirts of London began making
films that echoed the national mood: the populist war films
of Ealing (Ma^G^qmH_Dbg, 1942; Went The Day Well?, 1942)
celebrated the courage and resilience of ordinary people and
common soldiers, with little deference to the officer class.
After the war Ealing turned to comedy, bringing off a
hat-trick in 1949: Passport To Pimlico, Whisky Galore! and Kind
A^Zkml:g]<hkhg^ml.
Reacting against the bland “white telephone comedies”
of the fascist years, post-war Italian filmmakers created the
“neo-realist” movement, shooting everyday characters on
actual locations to achieve authenticity: Roberto Rossellini’s
Rome, Open City (1945), Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948),
Alberto Lattuada’s Without Pity (1948). Meanwhile in Japan
directors like Yasujirô Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi had been
making outstanding films since the silent era, largely unseen
by the outside world; it took a film by a much younger
director, Akira Kurosawa, to open the world’s eyes to the
glories of Japanese cinema when his Rashomon (1950) won
the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. CF
EARLY CINEMA | CLASSIC FILM
 

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1950S

 1950s 

MUSICALS, MCCARTHYISM AND FILM

NOIR… THE 1950S WERE A DECADE
OF CHANGE AND CONTRADICTIONS
WORDSJAMIEGRAHAM

THE 1950S | CLASSIC FILM

 CLASSIC DECADE


I
n the UK, the 1950s were a period of political conservatism
and economic prosperity, with living standards soaring,
unemployment averaging just 2 per cent, and leisure
activities becoming more accessible. Likewise, in America,
the era is associated with middle-class values, conformity
and post-war affluence.
The cinema of such an age, you might think, would be
bland and safe, or at least big, colourful entertainments
designed to sell comfort and contentment. And to a degree
you’d be right: the ’50s boomed with vivid epics shot in
Cinemascope, VistaVision and Cinerama like The Robe, The
*)y<hffZg]f^gml and ;^g&Ank; with lavish, exuberant
musicals such as :g:f^kb\ZgBgIZkbl, HdeZahfZ and The
Dbg`y:g]B; with Disney’s return to feature-length animation
(<bg]^k^eeZ, I^m^kIZg, Le^^ibg`;^Znmr) and foray into live-
action adventures (Mk^Zlnk^BleZg], +)%)))E^Z`n^lNg]^k
Ma^yL^Z, He]R^ee^k); with squeaky clean Doris Day vehicles;
and with goofball comedies starring Dean Martin and Jerry
2
Lewis, like Ma^Lmhh`^, Cnfibg`CZ\dland IZk]g^kl. And that
was just Hollywood; in the UK, we had the Lm'MkbgbZgƅl and
<ZkkrHgmovies.
But this was, as >ZlrKb]^kl%KZ`bg`;neel author Peter
Biskind describes it in his book L^^bg`Bl;^eb^obg`3Ahp
Aheerphh]MZn`amNlMhLmhiPhkkrbg`:g]Eho^Ma^?b_mb^l,
“an era of conflict and contradiction.”
Take those widescreen epics. Sure, they set out to saucer
viewers’ eyes with their scope and spectacle just as 3D
pictures like ;pZgZ=^obe, Ahnl^H_PZq and =bZeF?hkFnk]^k
sought to deepen thrills, but it was as a reaction to the threat

1 4

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1950S

 1950s

of television. Terrified that theatres would empty as

entertainment began to beam directly into people’s living
rooms, the studios sought to quash the menace of the
black-and-white goggle-box by going all-out to up the ante
on wonderment.
But upscaling spectacle was just a part of it, for studios
also forbade their stars from migrating to TV and, as the
decade wore on, made more and more television shows
themselves (they didn’t hit upon churning out made-for-TV
movies until the ’60s) while also selling the airing rights to
old movies. And the war didn’t stop there. Inevitably, many
directors and technicians fled to the television industry,
with Hollywood opting to plug the gap by (you guessed it)
handing big-screen projects to TV directors, many of whom

– Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer, Sam Peckinpah,
Robert Altman and George Roy Hill – would go on to shape
the cinema of the ’60s.
As the ’50s unfurled, the relationship between film and
television inched from bitter rivals to uneasy bedfellows,

10
with studios lifting the TV ban on their stars in 1956 and, in
turn, cherry-picking TV actors such as Charlton Heston to
fashion into movie stars. But the truth is in the figures,
and between 1951 and 1960 in the UK, cinema admissions

Films That plummeted from 1,365 million to 500 million, while a 50 per
cent drop was registered in the US.

Defined A Decade t wasn’t for a lack of fight. Not content to wield

 
1 SUNSETBOULEVARD
Hollywood-on-Hollywoodmovieswererife andBillyWilder’stale
ofawashed-upsilentmoviestarmakinga“comeback”isasgood–which
istosayacrid–astheyget
I SIZE DOES MATTER epics as their only weapon,
Hollywood engaged a number of strategies to
differentiate content, and it is here that things get
more interesting. For starters, one tactic was to craft adult
entertainments that wouldn’t be suitable for viewing in the
family living room. The most famous proponent of dark,
 
2 SINGIN’INTHERAIN
Anotherlookatthetransitionfromsilentmoviestosound butthis
timeingloriousTechnicolorandwithtoe-tapping umbrella-twirlingtunes
disturbing and illicitly thrilling fare was, of course, Alfred
Hitchcock, who hit peak form in the ’50s to serve up a host
RoutinelyrankedNoinGreatestMusicalslists of fine movies such as LmkZg`^klHg:MkZbg, Mh<Zm\a:Mab^_
and Ma^Pkhg`FZg, plus three copper-bottomed
 
3 SEVENSAMURAI
Thetitularronindefendapoorvillagefrommaraudingbandits
in AkiraKurosawa’saction-epicRemadebyJohnSturgesasThe
masterpieces in K^ZkPbg]hp, O^kmb`hand Ghkma;rGhkmap^lm.
These were films that dealt in sex, murder, suicide,
MagnificentSevenandriffedonbyPixarinABug’sLife corruption, guilt, necrophilia, voyeurism and more, movies
so psychologically twisted they even managed to stain the

 
4 ONTHEWATERFRONT
MarlonBrando’sdockerheroicallyinformsoncorruptunion
bossesWriterBuddSchulberganddirectorEliaKazannamed
names duringMcCarthy’switch-hunt butthisissogooditsurvives
the distastefulsubtext
shiny images of everyone’s favourite everyman James
Stewart and handsome, urbane Cary Grant.
But Hitchcock was not alone. The decade also proved
fertile for such uncompromising talents as Nicholas Ray (Bg
:yEhg^erIeZ\^,Chaggr@nbmZk, K^[^ePbmahnm:<Znl^), Stanley
5 KISSMEDEADLY
AbrutalfilmnoirthatlikewisethrumswithColdWaranxiety as
PI MikeHammerRalphMeekerinvestigatesawoman’sdeathonlyto
Kubrick (Ma^Dbeebg`, IZmalH_@ehkr), Robert Aldrich (DbllF^
=^Z]er, Ma^;b`Dgb_^), Sidney Lumet (*+:g`krF^g) and Elia
Kazan (:Lmk^^m\ZkGZf^]=^lbk^, HgMa^PZm^k_khgm, >ZlmH_
REX

stumbleheadlongintotheapocalypse

THE 1950S | CLASSIC FILM

 CLASSIC DECADE
>]^g), unafraid as they were to challenge authority, explore
sexuality and take their characters to dark, bleak places –
often the corners of their own tortured psyches.
10 Films That Defined
Likewise, films such as Ma^FZgPbmaMa^@he]^g:kf
(Frank Sinatra as a junkie), :gZmhfrH_:Fnk]^k (with its
mention of rape) and DZsZgƅl;Z[r=hee(sex and sensuality)
A Decade cont...
pushed at the censorship guidelines laid down by the Hays
Code. Even the Western could no longer be relied upon to
 
6 THESEARCHERS
CivilWar-veteranEthanHuntJohnWayneembarksona
five-yearodysseytoretrievehiscapturedniecefromtheComanchesA
offer white hats vs black hats – directors such as Delmer gorgeous-lookingWesternthatseetheswithhatred glimmerswithhope
Daves (;khd^g:kkhp, Ma^EZlmPZ`hg, ,3*)MhRnfZ), Anthony
Mann (Pbg\a^lm^kƅ0,, ;^g]H_Ma^Kbo^k, Ma^GZd^]Link) and
Budd Boetticher (L^o^gF^g?khfGhp, Ma^MZeeM, =^\blbhg:m
 
Lng]hpg) tarnished tin stars, empathised with Native
Americans and focused on character and psychology over
galloping gunfights. Ma^L^Zk\a^kl, meanwhile, saw legends
John Ford and John Wayne deal in obsession, racism and
7 INVASIONOFTHEBODYSNATCHERS
Tautplottingandclammyterrorasaliensusurphumansina
CalifornianburgCanbereadasaparableforfascism capitalismand
more butfearofCommiesistheobvioustakeaway
7
solitude – it might’ve been shot in Technicolor and
VistaVision, but its heart was black and shrivelled.
he defining genre of the decade, however, was
8 SWEETSMELLOFSUCCESS
AlexanderMackendrickmadesomeofthedarkestEaling
comediesbuthisUSdebut aboutanunethicalBroadwaycolumnist
BurtLancasterandunscrupulouspressagentTonyCurtis is
emulsifiedinacid
9 THESEVENTHSEAL

T science-fiction, which drilled into the deep

freeze of the Cold War to fuel tales of atomic
monsters and to dredge up subtext. Many of
these films were cheap to make and ideal for the rapidly
escalating drive-in market (there were more than 4,000
MaxvonSydow’smedievalknightchallengesDeathtoagame
of chessinaplague-riddenlandAnarthouseclassicthattapsintothe
nuclearanxietyofthes

 
10 VERTIGO
Askedtotrailafriend’swife JamesStewart’s‘tecspiralsdown
a rabbitholeofobsessionandmadness manipulationand exploitation
outdoor screens in America by the late-’50s) aimed at Hitchcock’smostvisuallyrich thematicallylayeredfilm
youths. Roger Corman fast-tracked Z-pictures like :mmZ\dH_
Ma^<kZ[Fhglm^k, Bm<hgjn^k^]Ma^Phke] and :;n\d^mH_;ehh],
but the true classics of the era were giant-ant movie Ma^f, 8
Japan’s @hcbkZ, which introduced atomic-fire breathing lizard
Godzilla to the world, and BgoZlbhgH_Ma^;h]rLgZm\a^kl. This

last saw the population of a small town silently replaced by
alien “pod people”, a none-too-subtle but strikingly
effective allegory for America’s fear of the encroaching red
menace. Communism, in fact, and Senator McCarthy’s
infamous House Un-American Activities Committee, which
lead to directors, actors and technicians being blacklisted
for possessing supposed Communist ties or sympathies,
infected cinema far and wide. Films like Ma^:mhfb\<bmr,
FryLhgChag and BPZl:<hffngblm?hkMa^?;Btackled it
head-on. Other movies were more circumspect, with a
notable example being the seven-times Oscar-nominated
Ab`aGhhg, in which Gary Cooper’s sheriff stands up to
a posse of outlaws. John Wayne branded it “The most
un-American thing I’ve seen in my whole life.”
Drive-ins also made good homes for movies featuring
rock’n’roll and/or juvenile delinquency. ;eZ\d[hZk]Cng`e^,
Kh\d:khng]Ma^<eh\d, Ma^@bke<ZgƅmA^eiBm, K^[^ePbmahnm:
<Znl^, BPZl:M^^gZ`^P^k^phe_… these were pictures that
recognised not everything was sunny smiles and well-being
in Eisenhower’s America, just as kitchen-sink dramas
favoured a docu-style immediacy and working-class
characters to cut through complacency in the UK. This British
New Wave, or “Free Cinema”, would peak in the early ’60s
(LZmnk]ZrGb`am:g]Lng]ZrFhkgbg`, :MZlm^H_Ahg^r, Mabl
Lihkmbg`Eb_^, Ma^Ehg^ebg^llH_Ma^Ehg`=blmZg\^Kngg^k, ;beer
EbZk), but it began in the late-’50s with Khhf:mMa^Mhi and
Ehhd;Z\dBg:g`^k.
A through line can also be drawn between the naturalistic,
rough-hewn performances by Brit New Wave actors like
Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, Oliver Reed, Laurence
Harvey and Richard Harris, and American Method actors
such as Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift,
Julie Harris and Paul Newman. Trained by the likes of Lee
Strasberg, Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner, they focused
on psychological, sociological and behavioural aspects,
6

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1950S

 1950s
and mined their own lives and emotions in search of
verisimilitude. A young Brando in particular was a revelation,
nominated Best Actor in a Leading Role four years running at
the Academy Awards, and winning on the fourth occasion,
in 1955, for his tough-and-tender portrayal of HgMa^
PZm^k_khgm’s ex-fighter-turned-longshoreman Terry Malloy.
Another notable trend of the ’50s was the influx of
foreign-language movies. Thanks to the rise of TV and the
declining Studio System – in 1948, the courts decreed that
studios should sell their theatre chains, ruling against a
vertically integrated structure of production, distribution and
exhibition – Hollywood-produced movies dropped by 50 per
cent during the decade. Taking up some of the slack were the
films of masters from around the globe, as names like
Ingmar Bergman (Ma^L^o^gmaL^Ze, Pbe]LmkZp[^kkb^l), Akira
Kurosawa (KZlahfhg, L^o^gLZfnkZb) and Satyajit Ray (The
:inMkbeh`r) began to trip off cinephiles’ tongues. The Venice
Film Festival had been around since the 1930s, but Cannes
debuted in 1946 and Berlinale in 1951, increasing awareness
of world cinema in the west. Indeed, in the late-’50s, the
most exciting movies were being made in France, with the
Nouvelle Vague birthing such directorial giants as Jean-Luc
Godard (;k^Zmae^ll), François Truffaut (Ma^-));ehpl), Claude
Chabrol (E^;^ZnL^k`^), Agnès Varda (<e^h?khf.Mh0) and
Louis Malle (Eb_mMhMa^L\Z__he]). A world away from the epics
that were routinely winning the Oscar for Best Picture during
the ’50s (Ma^@k^Zm^lmLahpHg>Zkma, :khng]Ma^Phke]Bg1)
=Zrl, Ma^;kb]`^HgMa^Kbo^kDpZb, @b`b, ;^g&Ank), these
9 French movies were shooting on real locations and dealing
with real social issues, or else turning genre tropes inside out
and fizzing up the action with stylistic brio.

All of the above and we haven’t even mentioned film noir
getting blacker than ever as it went out with a boom (Dbll
F^y=^Z]er, Mhn\aH_>obe), Billy Wilder mixing real danger

EVEN THE into sophisticated comedy (:\^BgMa^Ahe^, Lhf^Ebd^BmAhm),

gangster movies toughening up (Ma^;b`A^Zm, :e<Zihg^),
WESTERN Hammer Horror introducing new levels of gore and
sensuality (Ma^<nkl^H_?kZgd^glm^bg, =kZ\neZ) and Marilyn
COULD NO Monroe steaming up the screen.
No, the 1950s were not so conservative, after all. As
LONGER BE uber-critic David Thomson says in his intro to AZo^Rhn
RELIED UPON L^^gƎ:I^klhgZeBgmkh]n\mbhgMh*%)))?befl, “By the late ’50s,
a group of young firebrands stood ready to redefine movies…
TO OFFER Film became part of general knowledge – not just as
film-buff trivia, but as a general, educated awareness.”
WHITE HATS The socio-political and cultural changes of the ’60s and
’70s would be more volatile, but the seed was sown here. CF
VS BLACK HATS

10

THE 1950S | CLASSIC FILM

 1950s

WHAT GOOD
IS IT BEING

Marilyn Monroe WHY CAN’T I JUST BE

AN ORDINARY WOMAN?
REX

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1950S

 MARILYN MONROE
 A photo shoot
EVERYONE’S A STAR on Amagansett Beach
Long Island New York
AND DESERVES THE
RIGHT TO TWINKLE

Sexy, troubled, victimised,  A billboard

idolised – Marilyn Monroe announces the

premiere of The 

was a lot of things to a lot of SevenYearItch

people, but never “ordinary”.

We look at the enduring
appeal of Hollywood’s
ultimate sex symbol...

M arilyn Monroe would have turned 91 this June.

Even now, 55 years after the blonde bombshell’s
tragic death, we’re still smitten. And none more
than Hollywood. A trio of films about the starlet
once known as Norma Jeane are currently in
development – documentary Marilyn Monroe:
Murder On Fifth Helena Drive, Andrew Dominik’s
dark drama Blonde and book adap The Life And Opinions
H_yFZ_Ma^=h`%:g]H_Abl?kb^g]%FZkbergFhgkh^. There’s
also been a host of exhibitions dedicated to her iconic
look, from Bath’s “Marilyn – Hollywood Icon” show to
last year’s “90th birthday” pop-up in London.
The ultimate icon, you don’t have to have seen
THEREWASMYNAMEUP
a single frame of her work to recognise her signature
breathy, flirty, sexy, little-girl-lost act, the g-force
INLIGHTSISAID“GOD
curves, the va-va voom scarlet lips or the flaxen
hair. Though she may be plastered on everything
SOMEBODY’SMADEAMISTAKE”
from commemorative plates to clothes, Monroe is BUTTHEREITWASANDISAT
worth checking out on celluloid. An underrated
comedienne, a seductive on-screen femme fatale
THEREANDSAID“REMEMBER
and a mesmerising star, she left an indelible
impression on cinema and popular culture.
YOU’RENOTASTAR”YETTHERE
Miss Monroe, we salute you! ITWASUPINLIGHTS
THE 1950S | CLASSIC FILM
 CLASSIC STAR I AM NOT
INTERESTED IN
MONROE MANIA MONEY. I JUST WANT
“It’s amazing. She’s Mae West,
Theda Bara and Bo Peep all TO BE WONDERFUL
rolled into one.”
Groucho Marx
“To have survived, she would
have had to be either more
cynical or even further from
reality than she was. Instead,
she was a poet on a street corner trying to
recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.”
Arthur Miller
“They’ve tried to manufacture
other Marilyn Monroes and they
will undoubtedly keep trying.
But it won’t work. She was an
original.” Billy Wilder
“Marilyn is a kind of ultimate.
She is uniquely feminine.
Everything she does is different,
strange and exciting. From the
way she talks to the way she uses that
magnificent torso. She makes a man proud
to be a man.” Clark Gable
“I found her marvellous and
terrifically ambitious to do
better. And bright. She may
not have had an education, but
she was just naturally bright.”
Niagara Director, Henry Hathaway
“I love Marilyn Monroe. I think
she was the coolest blonde.
Like me she just didn’t care 
s Marilyn on an
what anyone thinks.” early modelling shoot
Paris Hilton
“I really admire Marilyn Monroe

but I would never try to
emulate her. I got the tattoo as  Preparing a scene
a warning. It warns me not to for ClashByNight
let myself be treated so badly by the film
industry so that it breaks me down.”
Megan Fox
“I don’t think any woman in the
world could get tired of being
compared to Marilyn Monroe.
She’s someone I admire greatly.”
Christina Hendricks
“She is an icon. I love her
sense of self. She is glamorous
and represents a time in
Hollywood that was a changing
point for women. I also think she was
misunderstood.” Lindsay Lohan

MYILLUSIONSDIDN’T
HAVEANYTHINGTO
DOWITHBEINGA
FINEACTRESSIKNEW
HOWTHIRDRATEI
WASICOULDFEEL
MYLACKOFTALENT ‘ EVERYBODYISALWAYSTUGGING
ASIFITWERECHEAP ATYOUTHEY’DALLLIKEASORTOFCHUNK
CLOTHESIWAS OUTOFYOUIDON’TTHINKTHEYREALISEIT
WEARINGINSIDE BUTIT’SLIKE‘GRRRDOTHISGRRRDOTHAT…’
BUTMYGODHOW BUTYOUDOWANTTOSTAYINTACT
I WANTEDTOLEARN –INTACTANDONTWOFEET
TOIMPROVE!
CLASSIC FILM | THE 1950S
 MARILYN MONROE
I’M SELFISH, SOME LIKE
IMPATIENT AND A IT HOT
Misses Watts and
LITTLE INSECURE. Williams tell us
about inhabiting a
I MAKE MISTAKES, scorching sex bomb…
I AM OUT OF
CONTROL AND NAOMI WATTS
We spoke to Watts
AT TIMES HARD in 2011, when she was
preparing to play
TO HANDLE, BUT Monroe in Andrew
IF YOU CAN’T Dominik’s (still
unmade) Blonde
HANDLE ME AT “Andrew
MY WORST, THEN said, ‘Why
is Marilyn
YOU SURE AS HELL Monroe the
DON’T DESERVE ME great female icon of
the 20th century?’ For
AT MY BEST men, she is an object
of sexual desire who is
in need of rescue. For
women, she embodies
all the injustices visited
upon the feminine – a
Cinderella, consigned
to live among the ashes.
I want to tell the story
of Norma Jeane as a
central fairytale figure;
an orphan child lost in
the woods of Hollywood,
being consumed by that
great icon. 
“It’s a high pressure
thing to take on
because of how iconic
she was… It’s not
the glossy, gorgeous
Marilyn Monroe we’re
 With third
portraying here in a
biopic. It’s a very meaty,
husband Arthur Miller
intense project.”
at his home in
Roxbury Connecticut
MICHELLE WILLIAMS
Monroe in 2011’s
A Week With Marilyn

 On a break 1930: The “It’s hard to
young Norma talk about.
from filming The
Jeane plays on I feel like we
Misfits in Nevada the beach. live together.
At a certain point,
something else does
take over. I don’t quite
feel myself these days.
I knew I wouldn’t be able
to resist. Physically and
vocally, everything about
her is different from me.
I’ve had teachers to help
me understand Marilyn,
so I could project an
essence of her. When
I first approached the
part, I thought that there
NO ONE EVER TOLD ME were three or four parts
I WAS PRETTY WHEN I WAS to her. But it rearranges
you, it shifts your
A LITTLE GIRL. ALL LITTLE molecules, lifts you up,
GIRLS SHOULD BE TOLD spins you around, puts
you down and you’re
THEY ARE PRETTY, EVEN not the same, for better
IF THEY AREN’T or for worse.”

THE 1950S | CLASSIC FILM



CLASSIC FILM | THE 1960S

1960s 

FROM BOND TO BIKERS, WE

REVISIT THE DECADE WHEN
EVERYTHING CHANGED…
WORDSPHILIPKEMP

THE 1960S | CLASSIC FILM



10  
1 BREATHLESS
Films That
Defined A Decade
Withitscool nonchalantstars itsglancinglyallusivedialogue its
cameracasuallyroamingtheParisstreetsanditsstartlinglyabrupt
jump-cuts Godard’sfilmencapsulatesthenouvellevague

2  
2 YOJIMBO
Mifune’sscruffyroninstrollsintoasmalltownsplitbetween
rival gangsandsetsthemtodestroyeachother inKurosawa’sallegory
of post-warJapanesecorruption

 
3 DRSTRANGELOVE

Inhisdoomsdayfarcepopulatedbyderangedmonomaniacs 
KubricksendsupthetoweringidiociesoftheColdWar–anddraws
a masterlytripleperformancefromPeterSellers

 
4 THELONELYWIFE
In’sCalcutta pent-upemotionstrembleonthevergeof
expressionasanintelligentwomanyearningforemancipationslips
unconsciouslytowardsabetrayalofherhusband

 
5 PERSONA
Thispsychologicalvampiremoviefeaturesamuteactresswho 
aloneinacoastalsummerhousewithonlyhernurseforcompany usurps
3
REX

theotherwoman’spersonality reducinghertobabblingincoherence

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1960S


L
et’s face it, the ’60s weren’t Hollywood’s finest decade. The
power of the old behemoth studios like MGM was much
diminished, but they were still hanging on, nervously looking
over their shoulders as TV leached away their audiences and
alarming new trends from overseas threatened their
long-held values. Ageing execs, convinced that “bigger was
better”, hurled massive budgets at the screen, usually with
disastrous results. Cleopatra (1963), which all but sank 20th
Century Fox, is the most famous of these monstrosities, of
course, but overblown comedies like It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad
World (1963) and leaden musical blockbusters like Doctor
Doolittle (1967) and Star! (1968) tanked nearly as woefully.
For much of the decade, too, old-fashioned prudery still
prevailed, while looking increasingly ridiculous. The hold of
the Hays Code, and its supporters in the Catholic-backed
Legion of Decency, was weakening – Hitchcock had already
defied its strictures by showing a flushing toilet in Psycho
(1960), and metropolitan arthouses largely ignored it when
screening the latest Bergman or Godard. But it wasn’t until
1 1968 that the threadbare Code was finally scrapped and, for
example, married American couples could be shown sharing
a double bed (shock, horror!) without risking denunciations
from the pulpit.
Elsewhere in the cinematic world, things were a lot
livelier. At the outset of the decade the French nouvelle vague
was still in full flood, with the alumni of Cahiers Du Cinéma
– Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol and their associates – setting the
pace. Inspired by father-figure André Bazin, borrowing tricks
from post-war Italian neo-realism, they made films fast,
cheaply and on the hoof, improvising dialogue and rejecting
studio artifice in favour of found locations and available light.
Jean-Luc Godard’s effortlessly cool Breathless (1960) sent
gangster movies bowling off down a whole new boulevard.
4 contemptuously dismissed as “Spaghetti Westerns”. But the
1960s
5
Alain Resnais’s Last Year In Marienbad (1961) played
sophisticated games with time and memory. François
Truffaut’s period romance Jules Et Jim (1962) offered up a
bitter-sweet meditation on evanescence. Claude Chabrol,
Louis Malle, Jacques Rivette, Éric Rohmer, Agnès Varda and
many more brought an irreverence and a vitality to French
cinema, whose influence spread worldwide.
Not least across the Channel. Truffaut may have remarked
dismissively that the words “British cinema” were “a
contradiction in terms”, but events in France helped to spark
off a British New Wave. Hitherto, working-class characters in
British films had been introduced mostly as criminals or as
comic relief. All that changed with northern-set movies like

Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night And Sunday Morning (1960), Tony
Richardson’s A Taste Of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness Of The
Long Distance Runner (1962), John Schlesinger’s A Kind Of
Loving (1962) and Lindsay Anderson’s This Sporting Life (1963),
giving working-class protagonists a dignity of their own.
At the same time Dr. No (1962) kicked off a very different
view of Britishness: the glamorous sex-and-violence
spy-fantasy world of James Bond, still going strong today.
And with :yAZk]=ZrƅlGb`am (1964), Richard Lester’s Beatles
film ushered in the swinging sixties.
eanwhile, Luis Buñuel, cinema’s greatest
M surrealist, had spent two decades in exile
after the Spanish Civil War. Persuaded back
to his native country, he took his revenge
with Viridiana (1961), a scathing parable satirising everything
that the Francoists held dear. (Promptly banned by the
outraged Madrid regime, it wasn’t shown in Spain until
1977.) Buñuel blithely proceeded to make his run of late
masterpieces, shot mostly in France, including The
Exterminating Angel (1962), Ma^=bZkrH_y:<aZf[^kfZb](1964)
and the deliciously kinky sex comedy Belle De Jour (1967),
with Catherine Deneuve as the world’s classiest hooker.
In Italy the ferment of neo-realism had long since died
down; Federico Fellini, once an adherent of its doctrines,
was heading off on his own increasingly idiosyncratic and
baroque path with 8½ (1963) and Juliet Of The Spirits (1965).
By contrast, Michelangelo Antonioni’s films became ever
more bleak and austere: La Notte (1961), L’Eclisse (1962) and
Red Desert (1964) shivered with disaffection, and his take on
swinging London in Blow-Up (1966) seemed calculated to
shrink tumescence. The most unexpected development,
though, came when Italy started to challenge Hollywood
on its own most hallowed territory with what were at first
THE 1960S | CLASSIC FILM
 CLASSIC DECADE
foremost of the “Spaghetti” directors, Sergio Leone, showed
that even here Hollywood had something to learn with his
“Dollars Trilogy” (A Fistful Of Dollars, 1964; For A Few Dollars
More, 1965; The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, 1966), elevating a
minor TV actor, Clint Eastwood, to international stardom.
For a few brief glorious years the Communist regime in
Prague eased off enough to allow the Czech Spring to
flourish. Film-makers like Miloš Forman (Loves Of A Blonde,
4<98,/#Yud#Fk|wloryÃ#+Daisies/#4<99,#dqg#MlýÏ#Phq}ho#+Closely
Observed Trains, 1966) delighted the world with their sardonic
vision. Then in 1968 the Soviet tanks moved in. After
making one feature in Poland, Knife In The Water (1962),
Roman Polanski moved west, bringing his maliciously
playful taste for pitch-black comedy first to Britain
(Repulsion, 1965; Cul-De-Sac, 1966) and then to America
(Rosemary’s Baby, 1968).
Further north, the Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman
was deep into his greatest period. Through A Glass Darkly
(1961), Winter Light (1963), The Silence (1963) and above all
Persona (1966) showed him repeatedly tackling the anguish
of a world in which god was absent and human relationships
could offer little comfort. Personal preoccupations, perhaps,
and full of Nordic gloom; but conveyed with an intensity and
a clear-eyed lucidity that lent them universal relevance.
Bergman single-handedly brought Swedish cinema to
international notice, something it hadn’t enjoyed since the
early 1920s. In Bengal, Satyajit Ray performed the same 6
service for Indian cinema, scorning the crass Bollywood
formula of “a star, six songs and three dances” in favour of


thoughtful humanist films drawing on the traditions of
Italian neo-realism and depicting his characters with
subtlety and warm sympathy. Having just completed his
10 Films That Defined
acclaimed Apu trilogy, in the ’60s Ray turned his attention
to aspects of India past and present: misguided religious
fanaticism in Devi (The Goddess, 1960), the patriarchal family
A Decade cont...
in Kanchenjungha (1962), and female emancipation in
Mahanagar (The Big City, 1963) and Charulata (The Lonely Wife,
 
6 BELLEDEJOUR
BuñuelathismostsubversiveeffectivelythawsoutCatherine
Deneuve’ssometimesglacialbeauty asarespectableupper-classwife
1964). With Nayak (The Hero, 1966), he took a satirical look at takesasecretjobatthelocalknocking-shop
the Indian film industry itself.
The death in 1956 of Kenji Mizoguchi, and in 1963 of
Yasujirô Ozu, left Akira Kurosawa in the unchallenged  
7 POINTBLANK
BritdirectorBoormanbringsnouvellevagueinspiredjump-cuts
andexistentialangsttotheAmericancrimemovie–andmakesa
position of greatest living Japanese director, and the best stone-facediconoutofLeeMarvin
known outside his native country. At the start of the decade
his status enabled him to set up his own independent
production company: a modernised version of Hamlet, The  
8 BONNIEANDCLYDE
Fullyintunewiththecounter-cultureofthe’s Penn’s’
s
bank-robbersarebeautifulanddoomedrebelsstickingittotheMan
Bad Sleep Well (1960) was poorly received, but he bounced
Beatty starring firstofferedthescripttoTruffaut
back with two of his best samurai movies: Yojimbo (1961),
whose plot was stolen by Leone for A Fistful Of Dollars, and
Sanjuro (1962), both starring Toshiro Mifune at his most  
9 THEWILDBUNCH
Violent?SureButthisisalsoamovieabouthonour chivalry 
comradeshipPeckinpah’sgangofold-timersmaybeoutlaws–but
they’refiercelyloyaltoeachothertothebitterend
8
 
10 EASYRIDER
“TwomenwentlookingforAmerica–andcouldn’tfindit
anywhere”There’dbeenbikermoviesbefore–butnonethatso
explicitlyraisedamiddlefingertoconformistAmerica

7 9

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1960S

OUTSIDERS, 1960s
FOREIGNERS dynamic. Red Beard (1965), with Mifune as a doctor in early
AND 19th-century Japan, was the last of their sixteen films
together. Of the younger generation, Nagisa Oshima
MAVERICKS spearheaded the iconoclastic, Godard-influenced Japanese
WERE MAKING New Wave, and Seijun Suzuki pushed the B-movie yakuza
genre into delirious excesses until he got fired by Nikkatsu.
THE RUNNING Meanwhile, back in America… For the first time in
three decades the major Hollywood studios were forced to
recognise that things were happening beyond their purview
and outside their control to which, if they weren’t to lose
their younger audience entirely, they would have to react.
The outsiders, the foreigners and the mavericks were
making the running.
In terms of cost-to-profit ratio, nothing the lumbering
majors could do came near the cheap’n’cheerful exploitation
pics being churned out on shoestring budgets for poverty-
row outfit AIP by producer/director Roger Corman. Paying his
employees (who included Francis Ford Coppola, Peter
Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese) peanuts but allowing
them great creative freedom, Corman wowed drive-in
audiences with horror movies (The Little Shop Of Horrors, 1960;
The Raven, 1963; The Man With The X-Ray Eyes, 1963), biker
movies (The Wild Angels, 1966) and drug-fests (The Trip, 1967)
along with his rather classier Edgar Allen Poe series (The Fall
Of The House Of Usher, 1960; The Pit And The Pendulum, 1961;
The Masque Of The Red Death, 1964).

maverick operating on somewhat more

A generous budgets was Stanley Kubrick who,

after his experience of old-style Hollywood epic
with Spartacus (1960) – “I was up against a
pretty dumb script,” he noted – decamped to Britain to make
Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964) and 2001: A Space Odyssey


(1968). Joseph Losey, a victim of the anti-Commie blacklist,

had arrived in Britain some years earlier. Teaming up with
Harold Pinter as screenwriter, he directed two trenchant
“outsider-eye-views” of British society, The Servant (1963),
and Accident (1967). Another self-exile, Orson Welles,
continued to march to his own highly personal drum with his
Kafka adaptation The Trial (1962) and the third and finest of
his Shakespeare films, Chimes At Midnight (1965).
But the three films that perhaps did most to dislodge the
old Hollywood assumptions all came from relative insiders.
With Ride The High Country (aka Guns In The Afternoon, 1962)
and Major Dundee (1965) Sam Peckinpah had already given
notice of a new take on the Western, but The Wild Bunch
(1969), taking on board elements of the Spaghetti Westerns,
blew the oater tradition wide open (and mightily offended
John Wayne). Arthur Penn had revealed the strong influence
of the nouvelle vague in his elliptical, noir-tinged Mickey One
(1965), but it was Bonnie And Clyde (1967), based on the
exploits of 1930s bank-robbers the Barrow Gang, that
dropped the bombshell. Loathed on its release by US critics
(with the exception of Pauline Kael), Penn’s complex, ironic
and lyrical gangster movie was acclaimed in Britain and
France, and bounced back across the Atlantic to clean up
at the Oscars.
Then two years later, building on what Corman had
already pioneered, came Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969).
And a little indie biker movie, made for chump-change, had
audiences queuing round the block and kick-started the
indie boom of the ’70s. With the new generation of
filmmakers – Corman alumni Coppola and Scorsese, plus
Spielberg, Lucas and De Palma – waiting in the wings, and
the youth market all primed and yelling for more, Hollywood
10 would never be the same again. CF

THE 1960S | CLASSIC FILM

 1960s

CHO

PSY
KIL

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1960S

 PSYCHO
In 1960, two horror
films terrorised
audiences. One was
a box office smash.
The other was labelled
trash. We celebrate
the violent visions
of Psycho and
Peeping Tom…
WORDSJAMIERUSSELL

LER M ovie murder wasn’t invented in

1960, but it was definitely
perfected. It was the year when
two Englishmen – one in
Hollywood, the other at Pinewood
– unleashed a frenzied attack on
cinemagoers, censors and actresses. The first was
Alfred Hitchcock, the rotund Master Of Suspense
who shocked audiences into submission with his


fiendishly sadistic Psycho. The second was Michael

Powell, the critically-acclaimed director whose
sordid, controversial Peeping Tom allegedly
dragged British cinema into the gutter.
Psycho was a manipulative, masterful shocker,
sinisterly styled and shot through with jet-black
humour. Peeping Tom was a cerebral meditation
on cinema and violence that lured in the dirty mac
brigade with its top-shelf, X-rated title. Both
films terrified. Both films titillated. And both
films would become defining examples of the
modern horror movie…

Pulp Fictions
Alfred Hitchcock wants the novel. Not just the
rights. But every single copy of the book. He tells
his assistants to go and buy up as many copies of
Robert Bloch’s pulp paperback as they can find.
The novel, based on the crimes of Wisconsin’s
notorious cannibal and necrophile serial killer
Ed Gein, is going to be his next picture and
Hitchcock is determined to keep its surprises
intact. He doesn’t want anyone in Hollywood
clued up about its shocks.
Shock value is what Hitchcock loves the most
about Psycho. Opening with the character Mary
Crane (changed to Marion in the movie), the book
pivots on a cruel narrative trick. You’re suckered
into caring about this sticky-fingered secretary
who you think is the heroine. But then, after she
steals $40,000 from her boss and goes on the run,

THE 1960S | CLASSIC FILM

 CLASSIC MOVIE

on 11 November 1959, though, there were kinks

she’s brutally killed off without any warning while
having an innocent wash in a rundown motel.
“The thing that appealed to me was the
suddenness of the murder in the shower, coming,

According to Powell, the movie’s name came
easily. “Leo said, ‘You know, what makes people
into peeping toms?’ And I said, ‘Well that’s a good
title!’ And he was rather shocked, you know. He
to iron out. Stefano had major issues with the
novel. “I told [Hitchcock] part of the problem was
that I really didn’t like this man, Norman Bates,”
he says. “I really couldn’t get involved with a
man in his forties who’s a drunk and peeps
through holes.”
The Master Of Suspense had a solution:
“How would you feel if Norman were played
by Anthony Perkins?”
Stefano’s eyes lit up: “Now you’re talking!”
Perkins, a wholesome, teeny-bopper pop star
who all the girls adored, was perfect for the
mummy’s boy serial killer. “I suddenly saw a
tender, vulnerable young man you could feel
incredibly sorry for,” says Stefano. “I could really
rope in the audience with someone like him.”
Roping the audience in was Psycho’s M.O. We
were shocked when the heroine was killed off in
the first act; then fooled into believing that Mrs.
Bates was a murderer – when really she was just

as it were, out of the blue,” said Hitchcock. He
knew right away that it was a brilliant plot
device. Imagine what would happen if you cast
a star in the role?
The Look Of Fear
It’s a very English sort of script meeting. Over
drinks, Michael Powell – British director of classics
like The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (1943) and
The Red Shoes (1948) – chats with Leo Marks about
movie ideas. Marks, a former WWII code breaker
turned screenwriter, has an idea he wants to pitch.
“Mr. Powell,” he asks politely, “would it interest
you to make a film about a young man who kills
women with his camera?” Powell lets a smile
whisper across his lips. “Oh yes,” he replies. “I
like that idea very much. That just suits me.”
Peeping Tom wasn’t the usual sort of fright
flick. Unlike most British horror films of the time
– the Hammer trio of Dracula, Frankenstein and
Ma^yFnffr – it wasn’t a period Gothic horror.
Instead it was a tale of ordinary madness as a man
suffers from scoptophilia: the urge to gaze.
said, ‘Oh it’s not that kind of film. Won’t that get
all the wrong people in?’ I said, ‘Well, let’s get the
wrong people in as well as the right ones…’” By
the time the script was finished, Powell was being
inundated by offers of finance from major film
companies. It seemed everyone wanted to make
a movie called Peeping Tom.
Going Psycho
Nobody at the studio was interested in making
Psycho. “Paramount absolutely didn’t want to
make it,” remembers screenwriter Joseph
Stefano. “They didn’t like the title, the story, or
anything about it at all. When Hitchcock became
insistent, they said, ‘Well, you’re not going to get
the budget you’re used to having for this sort of
thing’. Hence no Technicolor, no Jimmy Stewart,
no Cary Grant. Hitchcock said, ‘All right, I’ll
make do’.”
And he did. Made for under $1m using the
crew from TV show Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Psycho
was a low-budget shocker shot on Universal
Studios’ back-lot. Before shooting could begin
a mummified corpse and the killer was her shy
son Norman in mummy-drag. Hitchcock knew
how to press the audience’s buttons and he kept
his corkscrew twist close. A fake casting call
was put out for Mrs. Bates; the movie was
code-named Production 9401; not even the crew
got to see the last few pages of the script. Nobody
was going to discover the truth about Mrs. Bates
until Hitchcock was ready.
Fathers & Sons
While Psycho fixated on mothers, Peeping Tom was
all about fathers. When we first meet Mark Lewis
(Carl Boehm), he’s a murderous peeping tom
killing Soho prostitutes with this sharpened
camera tripod and filming their final moments.
He’s a freak but he’s also a victim, and Peeping
Tom’s power lay in presenting its killer with
unexpected sympathy.
“Mark’s father was his problem,” was writer
Leo Marks’ take on it. “His father was a
psychiatrist obsessed with fear. He was
interested in the cause of fear, in the responses

Psycho Path 
RAYMOND


LEATHERFACETHE TEXAS
ANDMARTHA CHAIN SAW MASSACRE
THE HONEYMOON KILLERS The clumsy cannibal remains
NormanandMarksettheball A twisted depiction of real-life murderous duo an icon of cinematic terror
rollingformurderousmaniacs Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck Favours pursuing and slaughtering
livingnextdoor… brutal instinct and grubby humour humans like cattle

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1960S

 PSYCHO

SIXTIESSICKOS

‘I tried to go beyond Opposite left and top Mark Lewis Carl

Boehm captures his victims in PeepingTom

the ordinary horror Clockwise from top left Alfred Hitchcock

outside Bates’ house Mark Lewis sets up
a shot gets up-close-and-personal with his
film with monsters’ camera equipment Lila Crane Vera Miles
encounters Norman Bates
MICHAELPOWELL

to fear, and he experimented on his little boy.
He photographed him at all hours of the day
and night. He would wake him up and frighten
him, photograph his responses. Mark grew up
obsessed with fear, and grew up to be a voyeur.”
Powell originally wanted Dirk Bogarde or
Laurence Harvey for the lead role. When they
didn’t bite he picked Carl Boehm, the son of a
famous Austrian conductor. “He was exactly the
right mixture of innocence and completely loony.
Very touching. Very moving,” the director
recalled. It was central to Peeping Tom’s method.
This was a horror movie that asked you to
sympathise with a seedy pervert and murderer.
“I tried to go beyond the ordinary horror film
of unexplained monsters, and instead to show
why one human being should behave in this
extraordinary way,” Powell said. “It’s a story
of a human being first and foremost.” As if to
prove the point, he cast himself in flashbacks as
Mark’s father and his own son Columba, just
eight years old at the time, as the young boy being
terrorised by lizards in his bed.
Peeping Tom was also a sly commentary on
cinema itself. By day Mark’s a focus puller on a
film set; by night he shoots soft porn. In between,
he finds time to make his own snuff movies. It
gave what could have been a simple horror film
a rich subtext. As we watch Mark watching his
16mm murder flicks, we become voyeurs too.
“The camera is something very frightening,”
Powell claimed. “I don’t think there is anything
more frightening than a camera which is filming
and which is watching you.”
Hitchcock tells screenwriter Stefano. “She’s
very self-conscious about her breasts. She
Bathroom Blues thinks they’re too big.”
Janet Leigh is being watched. She’s standing on To spare her blushes, the director has hired
Psycho’s motel bathroom set completely naked, a Vegas stripper, Marli Renfro, as a $500 body
her modesty preserved only by moleskin: “I double. But he still requires Leigh to show up
had [a piece] over both breasts and over the vital on-set near-nude and endure seventy-eight
part – and that’s it.” Around her the crew are camera setups over the next three weeks. It’s
getting ready to shoot what will become one of gruelling work. Every time Leigh steps into the
cinema’s most celebrated sequences, the Psycho shower, the water washes off the moleskins
shower murder. Leigh is already embarrassed. and wardrobe supervisor Rita Riggs has to
“I’m going to have a problem with Janet,” scurry on and replace them. “As a filmmaker,

 MICHAEL
MYERS
HALLOWEEN
Young Myers was
shaped by a perverse
 HENRY HENRY
PORTRAIT OF A
SERIAL KILLER
Grim grimy depiction of
real-life serial killer Henry

FRANCISDOLLARHYDE
childhood Suffer the Lee Lucas complete with MANHUNTER
little children? Dial it up dead -eyed slayings moral Based on Harris’ novel Red
as this nipper sociopath blankness and censor- Dragon psychos Dollarhyde and
knives first his sis and baiting violence Lecktor give a double dose of insight
later horny teens Horror via mundanity into the mind of a homicidal killer

THE 1960S | CLASSIC FILM

 CLASSIC MOVIE

HORRIFIC
Clockwise from left Carl Boehm in PeepingTom
Anthony Perkins as Psycho’s cross-dressing killer
Hitchcock and Janet Leigh on the Psychoset
Top right storyboarding Psycho’s shower scene

Mr. Hitchcock got impatient several times,”


recalls Riggs. “He would say, ‘Oh, come on now,
we’ve all seen more than that at the beach.’”
When it’s finally finished, the sequence
will be staccato edited into a visual assault as
Norman – in drag – attacks the naked Marion.
Switching incessantly between close-ups and
medium shots while Bernard Herrmann’s strings
jab like Norman’s kitchen knife, it’s one of the
most terrifying sequences ever committed to
celluloid; a groundbreaking piece of cinematic
violence that conflates murder, sex and
voyeurism. Never before had the murder of
a pretty woman been presented as such explicit
entertainment. “Psycho,” says Hitchcock, “allows
the viewer to become a peeping tom.”
The final shot of Marion’s dead, glazed eyes as
she lies draped over the bathtub isn’t any easier
to shoot. It requires 20 takes. Leigh lies there,
awkward, water trickling over her face, moleskin
breast patches peeling off. Up above, electricians
on double duty are standing on the scaffolding,
watching. “I knew they would get an eyeful,” says
the actress. “I said, ‘I’m not going to be modest,
let them look because I’m not going to stop this
shot.’ And I didn’t. And they did.”
‘Psycho allows the
viewer to become
the peeping tom’
ALFREDHITCHCOCK
Naked As Nature Intended
Pamela Green doesn’t mind being nude, but she
doesn’t like being gawped at. When the peroxide
pin-up girl known as “The Queen Of Curves”
arrives at Pinewood to shoot her scenes as a Soho
model, she quickly loses her temper. Kitted out in
risqué red lingerie and standing on a fake Parisian
street, Green realises she’s attracted a huge
audience. Half the crew from the Carry On movie
being shot on the next sound stage have sneaked
in to watch her.
“I explained if it was essential to the story
and if I had to strip, I didn’t mind the crew being
present,” recalled Green. “It was the strangers
hanging around to have a look at a nude girl that
I would not tolerate. I wasn’t a peep show.” She
won the battle and when the glamour model shot
her nude scene – the first in the history of British
cinema – the set was closed.
Peeping Tom was more interested in sex than
violence. There was certainly nothing to compare
to the frenzied assault of Psycho’s shower scene.
Instead, the horror came from the movie’s twisted
psychology, which delved into the mind of a sick
individual like a clinical essay in perversion.
Meanwhile Powell’s lurid Eastmancolor captured
the squalid seediness of late-1950s Soho, where
bruised cockney tarts rubbed shoulders with
smut merchants. While Psycho made you afraid to
go in the shower, Peeping Tom made you want to
take a shower.


HANNIBALLECTER
 JOHNDOESEEN
Doe the everyman skins his
own fingers stuffs fat men
’til they burst mutilates

PATRICKBATEMAN
THE SILENCE OF pretty faces… More AMERICAN PSYCHO
THE LAMBS disturbing is his absolute Fear of the alter-ego is
Caged but still deadly serial killer Dr L not only relishes philosophical conviction in realised with Bateman’s
inventive depravity fava beans and a nice Chianti with his crusade and his joy at Id – a monster consumed
his cannibalism he has fun with mind games too taunting his accuser to kill by violence

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1960S

 PSYCHO
All change!
NinewaysthatPsychoandPeeping
Tomchangedthemovies…

VIOLENCE
screenings. Posters for Psycho ordered everyone It’s not what you see it’s what you feel… Grubby and
malicious the violence here paved the way for New
not to give away the ending on pain of death, and
Hollywood and the Vietnam-era of US horror
warned that no one – not even the President of directors Be frayed be very frayed…
the United States or the Queen of England (“God
bless her”) – would be allowed into the theatre VOYEURISM
once the movie had started rolling. Norman and Mark are voyeurs and we the viewers
It was a master-class in movie marketing. are complicit Argento De Palma and US slasher
Forced to pay for their tickets alongside everyone movies watched and learned while serial killer
Henry taped his crimes for playback
else, critics were sniffy, but audiences were totally
thrilled. Psycho was the Jaws of its day.
It worked because, despite all the scares,it was
EARLY DEATHS 
Janet Leigh took an early shower and lead players
enjoyable. “To me, it’s a fun picture,” said have since suffered quick demises in Alien ToLive
Hitchcock. “The processes through which we take AndDieInLA Scream DeepBlueSea Martyrs and
the audience, you see, it’s rather like taking them TheDarkKnight
through the haunted house at the fairground or
the rollercoaster.” Even still, Hitchcock wasn’t SHOWER SCENES
Nudity violence? Then rain the pain! See Carrie
prepared for what happened next. “I’ve always DressedToKill TheProwlerSociety TheGrudge
been able to predict the audience’s reaction,” he and more Bathtubs? Shivers TheToolboxMurders
Not everyone liked feeling grubby. “The told Perkins. “Here, I haven’t been able to.” ElmStreet DarkWater CabinFever…
English critics nearly killed me for making Peeping In New York they queued around the block
Tom,” Powell claimed years later. It wasn’t an from 8am to the late show. In Boston and Chicago PARENTAL ABUSE
exaggeration. The tone of the first reviews was audiences went so crazy in the auditorium that Mark’s pa abused him and filmed the results Norm’s
ma smothered his sexuality… and many later movies
utterly hysterical. “Nothing, nothing, nothing the police were called. “Must report three fainting
RaisingCain RedDragon KillerInsideMe…
– neither the hopeless leper colonies of East at Paramount Theatre and expect many more included traumatised nutjobs
Pakistan, the back streets of Bombay, nor the among trade when week’s [box-office] figure
gutters of Calcutta – has left me with such a published,” read a cable from a Boston theatre “NORMAL” PSYCHOS
feeling of nausea and depression,” spat Len manager to studio bosses. The movie made Pre- 
 movie psychos were gibbering freaks
Mosley in The Daily Express. He wasn’t alone. “The millions, smashing box-office records. Then the new breed shy tender effeminate the
kind of outwardly nice boys you’d want as a
only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping When Powell saw Hitchcock’s film, he
neighbour Best watch out for the quiet ones…
Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly couldn’t help but admire it: “I think that it was
down the nearest sewer,” seethed Derek Hill in
The Tribune. As furore engulfed Peeping Tom, its
a much more successful horror film than mine
because I took the thing seriously, while he put
TOILETS
Hitch lifted the lid during his tour-of-the-motel
distributor Anglo-Amalgamated pulled prints in an extraordinary amount of humour.” trailer “A very important clue was found here…
from cinemas. “A disaster for me!” was Powell’s Fifty years on, choosing between the two down there” WithoutPsycho we wouldn’t have
DumbAndDumber's diarrhoea scene…
response. “It was the end of me with a generation movies is like being asked to choose between
of distributors and cinema owners.” Butchered a masterwork or a masterpiece… They’re both
for its US release, the film then slid into obscurity brilliant films that ushered in a new kind of
LOCALISED HORROR MOVIES
Universal and Hammer taught us that horrors lurk in
until the 1970s when it was rediscovered by, everyday horror. Now even the person sitting far-flung places Psycho and PeepingTombrought
among others, Martin Scorsese. next to you in the darkened auditorium was to be them home withTargets Rosemary’sBaby and
feared. Freud had infected the horror movie and NightOfTheLivingDead following suit
the cult of the serial killer had begun. Trace the
Screaming In The Aisles line from Psycho and Peeping Tom to The Texas SLASHER MOVIES
It didn’t all start with Halloween Hitch and Powell
Hitchcock didn’t want anyone to spoil Psycho’s <aZbgLZpFZllZ\k^, The Silence Of The Lambs and
R E X /A L L S TA R

made the granddaddy slashers hacking the way clear

surprises. He didn’t want late admissions at Se7en. Half a century later, we’re still screaming… for Italian gialli BlackChristmas TheTexasChain
theatres. And he certainly didn’t want press and still watching. CF SawMassacre… Jamie Graham

THE 1960S | CLASSIC FILM



CLASSIC FILM | THE 1970S

 1970s 

NEW HOLLYWOOD, MOVIE BRATS AND

THE BIRTH OF THE BLOCKBUSTER –
THE OUTSIDERS WERE TAKING OVER
WORDSJAMIEGRAHAM

THE 1970S | CLASSIC FILM

 C
ommonly referred to as the Last Golden Age of Hollywood,
the cinema of the 1970s birthed from an explosive mix of
socio-political and cultural ingredients to grow into
something strange and savagely beautiful that could only
flourish oh-so-fleetingly before it withered and died.
In the mid-’60s and early-’70s, the studios were
managed by old white men who sank their craggy heads
into their liver-spotted hands as America mutated beyond
recognition. Still cranking out Elvis Presley musicals and
pastel-hued vehicles for Doris Day and Rock Hudson,
they had no idea how to cater for counterculture youths
shaped by the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement,
feminism, the pill, drugs, The Stones and The Doors,

Charles Manson, the oil crisis and the Watergate
Scandal. Still trying to meet the challenge of TV by
commissioning bloated backlot epics made in CinemaScope
and Technicolor, they were flummoxed by changes in
technology that made equipment smaller, lighter and
2

10
more mobile, thus encouraging filmmakers to shoot on
the move and off the cuff.
Rigor mortis had set in, and movies were beginning to
change in a manner they could not fathom, as US pictures
like The Graduate, Bonnie And Clyde, 2001: A Space Odyssey and
Easy Rider reflected the confusion and disillusionment of
the times. Poking at crumbling authority and pushing at the
Films That
boundaries of sex and violence, this burgeoning movement
that would become known as New Hollywood gained
Defined A Decade
traction when a tide of outsiders surveyed the warping
American landscape: English directors such as John
Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy, The Day Of The Locust), Nicolas
 
1 THEFRENCHCONNECTION
WilliamFriedkinbringsdocu-grittothepoliceproceduralthrilleras
aNYcopGeneHackmantracksdownadrugsmugglerTwoyearslater 
Roeg (Performance, Don’t Look Now) and John Boorman (Point FriedkinwouldagainspinheadswithTheExorcist
Blank, Deliverance) played a prominent role, and European
auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni (Blow-Up), Roman  
2 THEGODFATHER
FrancisFordCoppola’smafiaepiccombinesold-schoolHollywood
classicismandromanticismwithadaringnarrativeandgraphicviolence
PartIIwasevenbolderCouldsuchfilmsbehitsintoday’smarket?

 
3 CHINATOWN
JackNicholson’snosyPIbumblesthroughalabyrinthineplotas
LA’s darkunderbellyisnotsomuchexposedasslitopenGreed murder 
incest corruption paranoia–thisisnotapopcorn-flick

 
4 JAWS
Themechanicalsharksank thefilmwent
percentover
budgetandSpielbergbecamebed-riddenwithagitation butitwasworth
itForty-twoyearson it’sstillnotsafetogobackinthewater

 
5 ONEFLEWOVERTHECUCKOO’SNEST
DirectorMilošFormanwantedBurtReynoldstoplay
RP McMurphy thefreespirittrappedinaninsaneasylumwhorebels
againstLouiseFletcher’sinflexibleNurseRatchedHesettled thankfully 
1 onJackNicholson

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1970S

 1970s

Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby), Bernardo Bertolucci (The Last

Tango In Paris) and Miloš Forman (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s
Nest) arrived in Hollywood to strip the town of its tinsel.
“There was a complete loss of nerve by the American
studios at that point,” noted Boorman. “They were so
confused and uncertain as to what to do, they were quite
willing to cede power to the directors.”
Said directors – who would, throughout the decade,
become the poster kids of New Hollywood – were tagged as
the Movie Brats: Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George
Lucas, John Milius, Brian De Palma, Paul Schrader and
Terrence Malick. They emerged from film schools, as fluent
in the ’50s and ’60s output of Ingmar Bergman, Federico

Fellini and Akira Kurosawa as they were in the ’30s, ’40s and
’50s studio pictures of John Ford, Howard Hawks and William
Wyler. And while the groundwork laid by a posse of slightly
older filmmakers – among them Stanley Kubrick, Mike
Nichols, Arthur Penn, John Cassavetes, Sam Peckinpah,
Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, Hal Ashby, Bob Rafelson,
William Friedkin and the Movie Brats’ mentor, Francis Ford
Coppola – cannot be overstated, with many of them still
flourishing in the ’70s and making some of the decade’s
finest films, it was the Movie Brats who made headlines.

he door was wide open and you could just

T waltz in… there was nothing that was too

outrageous,” gasped Schrader as he and his pals
were afforded a creative freedom that their
director-for-hire progenitors could never have dreamed of
(the exception being Orson Welles, who was gifted carte
blanche on Citizen Kane). Not ashamed to consider themselves
as artists and auteurs, they fashioned movies that favoured
characterisation over plot, that shattered narrative
3 conventions and smashed technical rules, and that were
populated by anti-heroes stumbling towards open,
ambiguous or bleak endings. Hollywood’s dream factory was
suddenly in the business of manufacturing nightmares.
As well as the famous films featured left and overleaf,
the ’70s gave us such seminal works as The Last Detail, Klute,
Mean Streets, Badlands, American Graffiti, The Long Goodbye,
Ma^y>qhk\blm, A Clockwork Orange, Five Easy Pieces, The
Conversation, Night Moves, Nashville, The Last Picture Show,
Shampoo, Dog Day Afternoon, Rocky, Carrie, Coming Home,
Manhattan and Apocalypse Now. No genre, it seemed, was
untouched by the anguish and ennui, with Westerns like
McCabe And Mrs Miller, Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, The Little
Big Man and The Outlaw Josey Wales rolling in the blood, dirt
4 and revisionism stirred up by The Wild Bunch, and Bob

THE 1970S | CLASSIC FILM

 CLASSIC DECADE
Fosse darkening the musical by charting the rise of Nazism
in Cabaret and hopping between timeframes and fantasy and
reality while laying bare his drug-hoovering, womanising
ways in All That Jazz.
Horror films, naturally, got in on the act, with George
Romero (Dawn Of The Dead, Martin), Wes Craven (The Last
House On The Left, The Hills Have Eyes) and mad Canadian
cine-scientist David Cronenberg (Shivers, Rabid) heading
a pack of kamikaze filmmakers who ditched logic and
resolutions in favour of chaos and insanity. “I wanted
something savage to happen,” says John Carpenter (Assault
On Precinct 13, Halloween) in the ace documentary American
Nightmare, while Craven grins, “All that bad karma has
gotta go somewhere.”
Certainly a good deal of it went into Tobe Hooper’s 1974
masterpiece Ma^M^qZl<aZbgLZpFZllZ\k^, as a group of
teenagers run out of gas near an old dark house occupied by
a family of cannibals. The kids, to say nothing of the viewers
who packed out drive-in theatres, know they’re in trouble
when the most likeable member of the clan is a 22-stone
killer called Leatherface who dresses in fleshy masks cut
from his victims and wields a chainsaw like it’s a toothpick.
Perhaps more than any other film of the 1970s, Ma^M^qZl
Chain Saw Massacre captures the fear, despair and violence
of the times, brutally satirising the all-American nuclear
family while offering a sickening portrait of a country in
economic crisis and ensnared in a guerrilla war played out
8
on territory it did not understand. Horror movies had been
dusting off their cobwebs and oiling their creaks since
Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960, with Bogdanovich’s Targets and
Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead also bringing the terror

home. But suddenly Dracula, Wolf Man and Frankenstein’s
monster looked as archaic as an Egyptian Mummy next
to Leatherface’s charnel house littered with bones, meat
hooks and a dinner table freighted with oversized, rotting
sausages – all granted snuff-movie immediacy by the
grainy 16mm images.

aturally, this new wave of cinema required a

N new kind of actor and actress. “Nobody had ever

seen themselves portrayed in a movie,” said
Dennis Hopper, director, co-writer and star of
counterculture biker pic Easy Rider, one of the first movies to
go looking for the America of its time. He was right, and
6

7
9

suddenly films were no longer inhabited by elegant,

articulate stars, but instead peopled by crumpled, adenoid,
awkward every(wo)men. Think of the cinema of the late ’60s
and ’70s and you think of Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman,
Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, James Caan, Richard Dreyfuss,
Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Robert Duvall and Elliott Gould;
of Ellen Burstyn, Diane Keaton, Sissy Spacek, Shelley Duvall,
Karen Black, Meryl Streep and Talia Shire. Even such
gorgeous creatures as Warren Beatty and Robert Redford,
Faye Dunaway and Jane Fonda, dug deep into warts-and-all
character parts, more interested in the politics and the
human condition than immaculate costumes and sparkling
repartee. These were actors and actresses trained by method
gurus such as Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler, with many of
them arriving in LA from New York to stink up movies with
honking accents and the grime of the city’s streets.
It should be noted, though, that not all movies embraced
the ethos of New Hollywood. A prime function of cinema
has always been and will always be to offer escapism, and so
the ’70s was also the decade of disaster movies, with Airport,
The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno offering
starry ensembles battling enormous odds as a bomb is
REX

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1970S

 1970s
smuggled on a plane, an ocean liner overturns, and a
state-of-the-art skyscraper goes up in flames. By 1978,
John Landis’s raucous frat-pack comedy Animal House was
encouraging viewers to ejaculate laughter at puerile men
behaving badly, and Grease was revisiting the relative
innocence of the ’50s to entertain with romance, toe-tapping
tunes and a dancing hotdog. Blaxploitation movies,
meanwhile, though possessing an inherent socio-political
charge, primarily traded in funky thrills – few were looking
to stain, subdue or subvert the crime genre in the manner of,
say, Chinatown, Night Moves and The Long Goodbye, to say
nothing of underrated gangster films like The Outfit, The
Friends Of Eddie Doyle and Mickey And Nicky.
If it’s awe-inspiring visuals and heart-swelling adventure
you’re after, mind, then it is to the movies of Spielberg and
Lucas that you must train your wide eyes. Jaws, which was,
in concept if not budget and execution, essentially a Roger
Corman B-movie (fitting given Corman gave many of the
era’s greatest filmmakers and actors the chance to cut their
teeth), ushered in the era of the blockbuster. Partly it was
the pace and scope of the thrills that unfurled so slickly on
screen, as a great white shark terrorises a seaside resort.
But it was also the wide release on 409 screens (movies, in
those days, were rolled out over weeks and months) and
Universal’s huge spend on TV advertising, then a brand-new
strategy. “My influences… were executives like Sid Sheinberg
and producers like [Richard D.] Zanuck… rather than my
contemporaries in my circle in the ’70s,” admitted Spielberg.
Two years on, in 1977, Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The

10 Films That Defined Third Kind would also be a spectacular smash, though it
was Lucas’ space opera Star Wars that broke all records,

A Decade cont... collecting $775m at the worldwide box office and taking
merchandising to light speed. “Star Wars was the film that
ate the heart and soul of Hollywood,” bemoaned Schrader,


who wrote MZqb=kbo^k and Raging Bull, and directed

 
6 ALLTHEPRESIDENT’SMEN
AlanJPakulaspecialisedinparanoidthrillersKlute TheParallax
ViewbutthisrecreationoftheWashingtonPost’suncoveringofthe
electrifying crime movie Blue Collar. It’s not, of course, that
simple, with many of the ’80s blockbusters that followed
WatergateScandal leadingtoNixon’sresignation ishismasterpiece proving quality fare. The downfall of New Hollywood is
more deservedly attributed to many of the filmmakers’
 
7 TAXIDRIVER
VietnamvetTravisBickleRobertDeNirosurveysallofNew
York’sfilththroughhisneon-soakedwindscreenandfixatesonsaving
unchecked egos, for while there is no doubting that movies
like Apocalypse Now and Heaven’s Gate are visionary
child-prostituteIrisJodieFosterFilmasterrifyingfeverdream masterpieces, their helter-skelter, catastrophically costly
productions allowed studio suits to again wrest power away
 
8 STARWARS
WhatbetterescapefromEarth’sturmoilthantovisitagalaxyfar 
farawayforagloriouslyold-schooltaleofGoodvsEvil kittedoutwith
from the directors.
The dream was over as the decade petered out, but
new-fangled dazzlingeffects? the films just grow all the more extraordinary with each
passing year. CF

 
9 ANNIEHALL
Thebirthofthemodern-dayrom-com asWoodyAllen’sneurotic
comedianAlvySingerlovesandlosesDianeKeaton’seponymous
nightclubsingerItbeatStarWarstotheBestPictureOscar

 
10 THEDEERHUNTER
PennsylvaniansteelworkersRobertDeNiro ChristopherWalken
andJohnSavageenlisttofightintheVietnamWarInthewordsof
Roger Ebert “Oneofthemostemotionallyshatteringfilmsevermade”

10

THE 1970S | CLASSIC FILM

 1970s
AL
PACINO
IN 2015, WE SAT DOWN WITH ONE OF
AMERICA’S GREATEST LIVING ACTORS
’ll talk a few more minutes,”
I
says Al Pacino, casually, to a

frantic-looking publicist. In
Pacino terms, this can spill
into a half-hour in the blink
of an eye. A Pacino answer
can stretch, meander and wander –
gloriously – across time and space, taking
you from his “very poor” South Bronx
childhood to the Actors Studio, where he
studied under Lee Strasberg, through a
career that’s seen him craft some of the
most memorable roles in cinema history.
Dropping out of school at 17 and
working low-paying jobs (busboy, janitor,
postal clerk) to fund his acting studies,
Pacino made his film debut in 1969’s
little-remembered comedy Me, Natalie.
Ten years and just eight films later, he’d
accumulated five Academy Award
nominations – bringing us such
unforgettable creations as The Godfather’s
Michael Corleone and Frank Serpico.
If the ’80s were less fruitful – despite
the enduring Scarface, the epic failure of
Revolution led to a four-year movie hiatus
– he returned with a bang in the following
decade. Three more Oscar nods and a win,
belatedly, for 1993’s Scent Of A Woman, and
there were still more modern classics to
come, from Carlito’s Way and Donnie Brasco
to Michael Mann’s Heat and The Insider.
Today, at 74, he’s in good spirits. Well,
apart from an irritation that’s affecting
his vision… “My eyes are tearing up,” he
REX
CLASSIC FILM | THE 1970S
WOR DS JAMES MO T TR AM
says, dabbing some drops in those dark
brown peepers. “I have an allergy. I think
it might be make-up.” For an actor who
loves the stage (he won two Tony awards,
for Does A Tiger Wear A Necktie?
and The Basic Training Of Pavlo Hummel,
long before the Academy finally saw fit to
reward him), that would be a disaster.
Dressed in a black shirt, jeans and
tinted sunglasses, with a silver chain
around his neck and beads on his wrists,
Pacino looks more rock star than
Broadway player. But no matter; at one
point, he gives a rendition of Hamlet’s “To
be or not to be” speech, mulling over “thus
the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er
with the pale cast of thought”. He stops.
“How do you do that? How is that done?”
Shakespeare has always been huge for
Pacino, from playing Shylock in Michael
Radford’s The Merchant Of Venice (a role he
previously played on stage) to his 1996
Richard III documentary Looking For
Richard. It’s doubtless why he was drawn
to The Humbling – Barry Levinson’s
adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel that
casts him as Simon Axler, an actor
devoted to the Bard who starts to lose
his enthusiasm for the work.
Renamed The Last Act in the UK (and
released straight to DVD), The Humbling
showed Pacino hadn’t lost his appetite, in
a decade when his movie output has been
far surpassed by his HBO work (including
Levinson’s You Don’t Know Jack).
What drew you to The Humbling?
It is a world [that of an actor] that both
Barry Levinson and myself are familiar
with. It is close to what we know. A lot of
things you do, you have to spend weeks or
months – months usually – to learn about
that world. And understand it. That’s a lot
of fun. But for some reason, it was fun
doing The Humbling because coming with
the knowledge of the world came a desire
to talk about it. And desire is important
and appetite is important. In The
Humbling, you see the guy has lost his
appetite. That is deadly!
It’s never happened to you?
[Shakes his head] I was never afraid of it.
That’s the way it is with all that stuff. It’s
like a heart attack. It happens. It’s too late
usually. But I’m not afraid of it. Absolutely
not. If I no longer want to do this, then
what do I do? I don’t know. But it’s like…
I love the story when someone says to
Picasso, “What if they put you in jail? What
would you do?” I’d sketch, he says. What if
they took your pad? He says, [I’d draw] on
the wall! It’s a metaphor, right? It’s my life.
How about Manglehorn? He’s a man who
finds it hard to emotionally connect. It
seems like there’s a lot of your older
characters inside him…
I think everything I do is a reflection. I
don’t know… I know this was as different
a character as I’ve played. I don’t know

 CLASSIC STAR
how that works. I really think… I don’t quite
know how to answer that. I didn’t see it as a
reflection of anything else I’ve done, though
it must remind people of other parts I’ve
played. I would like to know what parts…
Scarecrow, perhaps?
Scarecrow – really? Scarecrow? Me – the
character I played in Scarecrow is in
Manglehorn? Only because I’m the same guy
who played both!
Also, Bobby Deerfield?
Oh, yeah, I see what you mean – the sort of
recessive person, closed off from the world.
Wow, yeah. When you mention it, yes, I
would imagine some of that is there. Totally
different look, though!
Do you get nostalgic for 1970s when those
films were made?
Well I do, if I could go back and remember it.
I’ve lost complete track of what happened
then! It’s not remained there! Something
was going on!
What about the guys you worked
with then – Francis Ford Coppola,
in particular?
Oh, yeah, of course. When I reflect on it,

I also don’t remember it because a lot was
going on. I was a part of, I guess, what is the
’70s, and has become in retrospect a certain
era we went through, a time in movies.
On Godfather Part II you shared the bill,
though not any scenes, with Robert De
Niro. Did you feel any rivalry with him?
Since I know Bob so well, and he’s a real
close friend – I love him – it seems hard to
think back on that time. I would imagine,
you need to move away from that as much as
you can. And when you’re younger, you’re
affected by it. I’m not now at all. But you sort
of get around now. You’re up for the same
roles. That has something to do with it.
Back then, whether it was Serpico or Dog
Day Afternoon, you played a lot of cops and
criminals. Do you think these roles came
to define you?
I would imagine so. Those were the
successful movies I made, so yeah. But I have
to tell you, I’ve done a lot more than that!
What about Scarface? What sort of
reaction do you get to that nowadays?
I do get a lot of people who are fans of
Scarface, and I’m glad, because there’s a lot
to say in that movie. As time has proven
over the years and the way it’s lasted. We
were surprised when it first came out, not by
the people but… Brian De Palma was really
talking about something in a certain way.
But I am surprised by its longevity. Montana
CLASSIC FILM | THE 1970S
became a touchstone for the hip-hop
generation, it seems… I would imagine.
Everywhere I go in the world. The truth is,
it is a major player everywhere I go, and I’m
very happy about that.
At the beginning of the 1990s, you made
Dick Tracy. Would you agree that it seems
an unusual choice?
Warren Beatty got me to do that. Just
pressured me. But he does it in such a
wonderful way. With that kind of
intelligence and talent and charm. You can’t
say “no”. I love him. I love this guy, very
much! He is a friend.
Shortly after, you made Scent Of A Woman
and won the Oscar. How much did that
mean to you?
How do you say something about that? The
event itself puts you in a state. You’re being
viewed all over the world and you’re getting
this… it’s tantamount to winning a gold
medal at the Olympics. Only you haven’t run
anywhere! You did a movie a couple of years
ago and now you’re getting it! It’s got all
these tentacles to it. The event is so
staggering. And then you get it, and you
have it, and can’t really express what you
want to express. This is a big thing and – I
can’t find the word – I’m sort of numb from
it all. And then later you feel a certain way.
You’ve got this thing, and you feel as close to
being a winner as I’ve ever felt in my life. It’s
not that you necessarily deserve it, but you
just got it! I did the movie – I’ve done many,
and had a lot of nominations, but the
world… people start to congratulate you. It’s
a big thing. It’s bigger than you thought it
would be.
Do you remember much about the
night itself?
I was lucky, because I was in the middle of
filming Carlito’s Way. It kept me sane,
because I had things to do, because I’m
playing another part, and wisely, [Carlito’s
producer] Marty Bregman got me on a plane.
I was whisked off into an elevator packed
with people. I didn’t even have an after-
Oscar interview with anybody! I got put on a
plane, like in some Mafia movie! You’re in a
private jet… I was saying “goodbye” to my
girlfriend at the time. I’m saying “bye!” and
she’s saying, “where you going?” and I’m
like, “I gotta go back and work. I don’t know
what I’m doing!” The next day, I was on the
set. So not only was I not really able to
absorb the experience, I didn’t even get to go
to a party! What a pain in the butt that is!
But it’s an Oscar – it’s a big thing. At the
same time, doing the picture, I had to do
these scenes… and I was an actor, because
that’s what I am. I’m not an Oscar-winner.
I’m an actor.
In the late ’90s, you started directing –
notably documentary Looking For Richard.
What inspired that?
In Looking For Richard, I had a real passion to
talk about why we are so, in America really,
so stuck when it comes to Shakespeare. We
didn’t want to do it. And I had an appetite to
try and understand that. That was what I was
after. That was driving me. That was four
years I was doing it. I don’t recommend it! It
was really a pain in the butt to go out there
and try and do this stuff! Once I started, I
went too far. I did it with my own money.
What are your memories of working with
Chris Nolan on Insomnia?
Chris Nolan is someone I would love to make
another picture with. That was really a treat
working with him. Talk about your remakes
– that was tough to do.
Ocean’s Thirteen aside, you haven’t really
done many blockbusters. Is there a
reason for that?
All careers are different. The motors in all of
us are different, and they have to do with
our lives more and more as we get older,
and how you get through it – all of us. We’re
all different. We all go through cycles. If you
explore your own life, you’ll be going
through a certain cycle. Simple stuff. At
this point, I want to do things that at least
I connect to.
Recently, you’ve made a few films for
HBO. Why?
I’ve never done television. I don’t love
television. I don’t think it has a real place.
I did Angels In America – a great masterpiece
of a play by Tony Kushner. I did Kevorkian
[in Barry Levinson’s You Don’t Know Jack],
the story of a great scientist and an advocate
of people’s rights. And then recently I did
Phil Spector. So some of the more
controversial pieces, or things that have an
edge, I’ve done on television, and that seems
to be what the world is open to.

I ALWAYS THOUGHT, ‘I
HOPE THE AUDIENCE
GETS A SENSE THAT
THIS GUY HAD
ANOTHER LIFE’
Are audiences less inclined to go to
cinemas today?
Movies are being put on little discs and
iPhones and it’s no way to see a movie, I
have to say. You ever see Dog Day Afternoon
on a big screen, it’s an experience. The way
[Sidney] Lumet filmed it, the way he
directed it, it was like a happening – it was
going on right there. It was alive to the
moment, like it was really happening, and
that’s how Lumet did it. It absorbed you, it
had the size to bring you in. But you’re
seeing it on this [picks up an iPhone], what
do you see? Imagine looking at The Humbling
on one of these things. It’s just different.
Barry Levinson and I were looking at The
Humbling, last night, on a big screen, and
I felt good about it on the big screen.
How do you react when people refer to
your acting in such glowing terms?
You let people do their thing, and they have
feelings… I don’t take it literally! Mercifully,
I forget it, almost instantly after it’s said.
I just try to accept it because it’s what
A L L S TA R
they’re feeling at the time, and it is
enthusiasm – and enthusiasm comes in
many forms. It’s a strange adjustment, I
must say. When I was younger, I had
another reaction to it. I didn’t understand
it. It was something I tried to avoid. As you
know, I was something of a – as they say in
this business – recluse. Never did
interviews. But those days are over.
Do you have any regrets in your career?
I don’t focus on the regrets, which I must
have plenty of. I wish I hadn’t done things. I
think regretting it is a pointless thing. Out of
the things you do that you wish you didn’t
do, other things come. So I don’t have
regrets. It’s a strange way to live.
You never married. Was that something
you’d still consider?
Of course it’s possible. It seems beside the
point though. I mean, yeah! I have no idea,
but I never say never. I don’t think of
marriage that way, but it’s very possible
that this could happen.
Do you worry about retiring from acting?
I have many things that are conflicts in my
life – that’s not one of them! I don’t think
so. But we could always start; you never
know, tomorrow I might! But right now…
I don’t know why.
Has having children given you
renewed vigour?
Of course! Why am I saying I don’t know
why? I have three children. I have a daughter
[Julie Marie] who is a filmmaker now . And my
little ones [twins Anton James and Olivia
Rose] are tremendous. Every day, you come

home, and the kids are in my arms.
Sometimes they’re not well, they’re sick,
and you’re taking temperatures… y’know,
when I come home from any outing, whether
it’s a movie, or some festival stuff, you come
home and open the door and walk in, and it’s
not about you any more. And there’s a real
relief about that.
Have they seen many of your movies yet?
I haven’t done that yet. My son is asking
me, ‘What’s this Scarface?’ All his friends
know it. And I say, ‘I think it’s not quite time
yet to see Daddy in this. But it’s a film you’ll
like.’ I mean, look at these video games they
play – wow!
Will you take them to the South Bronx,
where you grew up?
That is a great thing to do. That is what I want
to do now, take them to the South Bronx,
where their Dad comes from, literally. It’s all
about when people are ready. They’re going
through their own cycle right now, but I think
they’re going to be ready pretty soon. But that
choices thing is very important. That’s very
important to me. And that’s the one thing in
The Humbling, if you notice what he’s losing is
the appetite… that’s tough. You go out there
to do this kind of stuff. I’m sure you have an
appetite for what you do – talking to old jerks
like me, and trying to figure out what the fuck
is trying to make this guy still stand! CF
THE 1970S | CLASSIC FILM
 1970s
The
WarriorsNearly forty years ago, a brown-leathered gang from
New York known as the Warriors stormed cinemas.
What followed was box office gold, beatings and
even deaths. We look back at a time when a cult came
out to play… WORDSSEANEGAN

INFEBRUARY

CINEPHILESWERESTARTLEDTO a great chase film. I still get chills thinking about it.” Gordon
SEELINESAROUNDBLOCKSTOSEETHEWARRIORS
–ALOWBUDGETERWITHNOWELL-KNOWNNAMES
They were equally startled to realise that, whereas the street
gang culture of the film was one normally only depicted in
motion pictures as a way of exploring social degradation, this
movie portrayed it from the street gangs’ point of view. And
made it look desirable.
It was an obvious but revolutionary approach that clearly
struck a chord with the young. The Warriors’ glittering visuals,
meanwhile, had a resonance for a different demographic: the
renowned, hard-to-please critic Pauline Kael raved about it in
The New Yorker. In short, it was a sensation. Recalls director
and co-screenwriter Walter Hill, “From out of nowhere we
were the number one box office film.”
The glory of this scenario of David vanquishing the
cinematic rival Goliaths was to be short lived though. When
stories of people murdered at screenings began appearing,
accusations flew that the film’s fight scenes and its amoral
stance incited violence. Paramount Pictures reacted to the
furore by withdrawing all ads, thus severely threatening
continued success for a film that had seemed destined to
prove, in the post-Star Wars age, that gigantic spectacle and
massive promotion were not everything.
The Warriors started life in 1965 as a novel by Sol Yurick,
who hit upon the idea of taking the New York gangs he had
observed in the ’40s and ’50s and mixing them up with the
Greek classic Anabasis by Xenophon, which depicted an army
of 10,000 men embarking on a heroic homeward trek across
enemy terrain. Producer Lawrence Gordon happened upon
a coverless edition of The Warriors in paperback on a bookstore
discount spinner and was immediately hooked. “Simply
put, it was a very good idea for a movie,” he tells us. “It was
CLASSIC FILM | THE 1970S
CLASSIC
MOVIE
optioned the book and commissioned a screenplay from
David Shaber. He then recruited Walter Hill to rewrite the
Shaber script and to direct.
Hill admits he didn’t much like Yurick’s novel but, like
Gordon, was struck by the simplicity of the basic idea.
However changes were necessary in the adaptation. For one,
the sheer nastiness of the gang in the book (gang rape,
ritualised killing) had to be softened. Secondly, the novelist’s
protagonists had been under 16 while the film depicted
men mainly in their late twenties. “That really had to do
with the labour laws more than anything else,” explains
Hill, in reference to the impact child actors’ short working
days would have had on the extremely low budget provided
by Paramount.
With the cameras ready to roll, the plot Hill had
constructed on the foundations laid by Yurick and Shaber
went like this: Cyrus is the leader of the Riffs, the largest
gang in New York. He calls a gang pow-wow (a “conclave”)
in a Bronx park, where he tells the nine-man deputations
from the various gangs that there are 60,000 of them to
20,000 New York cops and that the “future is ours”.
Immediately after this preposterous but persuasive speech
– delivered mesmerisingly by actor Roger Hill – Cyrus
is shot dead by Luther, the demented leader of
the Rogues, who promptly pins the blame on
the Warriors, a mixed-race aggregation from
Coney Island. When the cops raid the venue,
scattering the gang members, the Warriors
find they must make their way back to their
native turf 27 miles away through a city whose
various gangs are all out to get them for their
supposed treachery.

To make matters worse, they are bereft of weapons as
conclave attendees had voluntarily left them behind in
a gesture of goodwill. Of course, their dilemma would be over
The gang
if their pride allowed them to simply remove the leather
to
the streets
waistcoats bearing their gang affiliation – but then so would
the movie. The Warriors’ ranks are soon augmented
left
Violence
by Mercy, a beautiful rival gang’s moll (Deborah Van
over
as
the
Valkenburgh) who hooks up with them because “maybe
battle
to
I’m looking for some real action.”
FORAMOVIEWITHSUCHASIMPLEPLOTLINEAND
MINIMALLOGISTICSITALLOCCURSINONE

-HOURPERIODITWASONEWHOSESHOOTING
WASPLAGUEDBYANUNUSUALDEGREEOFSTRIFE
ANDCHAOS
The filming was incredibly arduous, simply by virtue of
the picture’s chase-driven nature. “You have no idea,”
recalls Thomas G. Waites, who played Fox. “It was take
after take after take, running, running, running, running,
running, running.”
There was also the problem of real-life gang members
loitering around the sets. David Patrick Kelly – who played
Luther – recalls: “There were some kids that wandered up
during the big conclave scene and they were kinda scary. The
atmosphere in New York in the ’70s was quite intense.”
THE WARRIORS

Then there were Deborah Van Valkenbergh’s injuries. NEWKIDSON
“I fell down and landed on my right wrist, fractured it and THEBLOCK
was hauled off to the hospital and put into a cast [up to my] Above
armpit,” she says. When she returned after a month of takes
convalescing and a rewrite by Hill that saw her character
THERIVALS
acquire a stolen blue jacket that conveniently covered her
Far
splint, she was rewarded with a baseball bat in the face while boils
rehearsing another scene. Warriors
The biggest trauma, though, was the drastic decision Hill get home
and Gordon took about seven weeks into shooting to fire
their joint leading man. The thoughtful Fox had originally
been as important as Swan – a smouldering stand-in
“warlord” after original leader Cleon gets wasted at the
conclave – and one half of the movie’s love story. “We ended
up going off together,” explains Waites of the original plan
for his character and that of Van Valkenbergh’s. “Our whole
mentality was, ‘This violence is bad and there’s gotta be
another way to live.’” All these plans were torn asunder when
the director decided he’d had enough of Waites. The
classically trained actor recalls he was “bitching and
moaning” to Hill, saying, “It’s too violent and this isn’t the
movie that we agreed to make.”
Waites’ sacking necessitated hasty rewriting. Asked if they
lost any days of shooting, Hill laughs. “No. Didn’t have ’em
to lose. We’d shoot all night and then I’d sleep and then I’d
write a while and I’d write on the weekends. It was hectic.” A
THE 1970S | CLASSIC FILM
 CLASSIC MOVIE
camera assistant was deployed to portray Fox getting thrown
into the path of an oncoming subway train while grappling
with a cop, leaving Mercy and Swan to now become the love
interest, while an entire subplot involving Swan being
captured by and escaping from a rival gang was jettisoned.
Despite Hill’s Trojan-like writing work, the most famous
line in the movie – Luther’s now iconic taunt of “Warriooors
– come out to plaaaay!” – is, ironically, not his. “It wasn’t
in the script,” points out Kelly. “Walter said, ‘Just make similarly-titled The Wanderers. The limited post-production
something up’. I said, ‘I gotta try to do something that’s window meant that Hill was prevented from opening and
strange and different’ and I found these beer bottles.” Kelly closing scenes with comic-book panels.
placed the bottles over the ends of his fingers and played For different reasons, he was also denied the right to refer
them like castanets as he intoned the jeer over and over in to the Anabasis legend that had inspired Yurick. Hill: “I said
the voice of “a guy downtown who was one of the creepiest that I thought the movie was incomprehensible unless you
people I ever knew.” He adds, “I honestly didn’t know if he understood it was in some kind of science-fiction mode and
would keep that in there.” that it was in some way based on the Greek antecedents and
In the final week of shooting, the cast found themselves that it was comic book in its nature.” Only when he got the
asked to film a series of brief, dialogue-heavy scenes on opportunity to issue a director’s cut on DVD in 2005 was Hill
a subway train. Hill had decided that the day scenes in Coney able to implement his original plans.
TICKETTORIDE Island at the beginning were to be removed so as to enhance
Top
right
Making
the neon-dappled mood, necessitating some exposition. ONFEBRUARYACLASHINPALMSPRINGSAT
their
way
across
Says James Remar (Ajax), “It works really well… having it A WARRIORSDRIVE-INSCREENINGRESULTEDIN
New York start in the evening. Deborah Van Valkenburgh’s eye fading A FATALSHOOTING
into the dissolve into the sunrise is a beautiful shot. It has By 15 February, there had been three Warriors-associated
POINT&SHOOT
more of an impact.” deaths in four days, the third a stabbing in which the killer
Below
Luther

David
Patrick
Kelly
However Hill’s other plans for the movie’s content were yelled “I want you!”, a line superficially similar to a part of
threatens
Warriors
spoiled by the necessity perceived by Paramount to get The the film’s script. The American media was suddenly
War
Chief
Swan
Warriors to the cinema as quickly as possible to stave off the crammed with stories near identikit to the storm generated
Michael
Beck competition of other gang-related pictures, including the in the UK eight years earlier by suggestions that another
youth gang-related movie – A Clockwork Orange – had

inspired murder and rape. There were reports of fights
occurring in cinemas across the nation to the backdrop of
Swan and co’s travails. Some fleapits quickly dropped The
Warriors, while others persuaded Paramount to pay for
security at screenings.
“I think all of us were surprised that there were actual
incidents and certainly initially felt some sense of guilt and
responsibility for being in a picture that would cause that,”
admits Michael Beck (Swan). “But in every instance where
there was violence… Kids who were predisposed to that as
they were in gangs already, were gathered together in a place
where they normally wouldn’t have been to see a movie about
gangs and from that came some incidents.”
Hill agrees, adding, “The deeper question is if 99 and nine
tenths of your audience was moved in an aesthetic way by
the thing and this microcosm of one one-hundredth or one
one-millionth or something went out and did a bad thing,
is that a reason not to have the film? What price are we
willing to pay for freedom of expression?” The director also
rejects the notion that a non-judgmental movie about gangs

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT TheseriouslymixedfortunesoftheWarriors’subsequentactingcareers…

FollowingthesplashmadebyTheWarriors boththe
produceranddirectorenjoyedfortuneinHollywood 
oftentogetherGordonproducedpictureslike
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numbers SouthernComfort Hours Brewster’s
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had moremixedfortunes
Sadly MarcelinoSánchezwhoplayedaerosol
artist Rembrandtdiedofcancer agedJames
RemarAjaxandDavidPatrickKellyLutherhave
becomefamiliarfacesonscreen withmanyTVand
filmcreditsbetweenthemincludingTwinPeaksKelly
andDexterRemarHowever theyaretheclosest
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DorseyWrightCleonnowdivideshisenergies
betweentheNewYorkTransitAuthorityandacting 
whileDeborahVanValkenburghMercydivideshers
betweenactingandherworkasanartistDavidHarris
martialartsmanCochiseisalsostillanactor though
withlimitedscreencredits
OthershavedriftedoutofHollywoodlifeTom
McKitterickhappy-go-luckyCowboyworksasa
photographer whileTerryMichosthehyper whinging
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withencyclopaedicknowledgeofrivalgangsworked
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issaidtobemoreinterestedinpoetrythanacting
MichaelBeckSwanwastheobviouschoicefor
superstardombutwhilehehashadsomesuccess
readingJohnGrishamaudiobookshehasmadesome
badmissteps“IwasmiscastinXanaduthemusical
ThepromisecreatedinTheWarriorswasaffected
negativelybythis ”hesays
ThomasGWaitesFoxrefusedtobecreditedin
themovieandfeelsthedecisionhasadverselyaffected
hiscareerAtthetimehehadaprestigiousthree-
picturedealwithParamount“YouwouldhavebetI
wasgoingtobethenextRobertDeNiroandthatdidn’t
happen ”helamentsHenownotonlyacts butteaches
actingandtellshisstudents“nottomakethesame
mistakesImade whereyouregogetsthebestofyou”

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1970S

 would lead to bad behaviour. “It is non-judgmental in that
it does not have an overview,” he says. “It is absolutely
TheWarriors’
judgmental about conduct and codes of honour.”
were
stylised
Whether Hill got a bum rap or not, the spotlight on
“comic-book”
than
realistic
Paramount made the studio lose its nerve. “They pulled the
advertising,” Hill recalls. “Which wrecked the business of
the thing or certainly severely limited it.” Though he adds,
“It was a profitable film,” The Warriors’ domination of the
American box office came to an abrupt end less than a
month after release.
ALMOSTFORTYYEARSLATERTHEWARRIORS
IN SOMESENSESNOWFEELSARCHAIC
MAINLY BECAUSEOFFASHIONSNOLONGER
SEEN OUTSIDE SHOREDITCH
It’s astonishing to realise that The Warriors carried an
“X”-certificate when first released in the UK: the swearing
is noticeably low and the landscape so prior to the likes of
drive-by shootings as to seem like a playground.
Yet leaving aside its age, it is puzzling that The Warriors
ever acquired accusations of irresponsibility in the first place.
The fight scenes were clearly never meant to be about
realism: the violence is less about capturing the chaos then
prevailing in a crumbling New York, more about creating the
kind of stylised rumbles found in West Side Story. “It is really
comic-book violence. You can hear the kapows and the
bams,” says Beck. “It’s really not the kind of realistic
violence that even the movies of the day had.” In a way, the
2005 Rockstar videogame – for which most of the original
cast lent their voices – saw the movie find its true quasi-
cartoonish level.
The Warriors has risen above both a period-piece status
and notoriety and regained the position it had just before the
violent incidents, when word of mouth and critical kudos
indicated it was something special. It is now a cultural
landmark, having spun off not just games, but figurines and
a comic book.
As Hill points out, “To me, what’s kind of interesting is
there was never any retraction of the positive [notices].”
The most positive of those notices of course was that of
REX
Pauline Kael. She enthused of the film: “It has – in visual READYTORUMBLE
terms – the kind of impact that ‘Rock Around The Clock’ Above
had when it was played behind the titles of Blackboard Jungle. fights
It’s like visual rock and it’s bursting with energy… There’s and
rather
a night-blooming, psychedelic shine to the whole baroque

movie.” Even hardass Time critic Frank Rich, who didn’t
like a film he considered tedious and woodenly acted, had
to concede, “Hill creates creepy poetry out of menacing
shadows, glinting switchblades, garish graffiti and charging
subway trains.”
“When I became aware that maybe the movie was going
to hang on in people’s minds, it was in the 1980s,” says
Hill of The Warriors’ enduring stature. “As I was travelling
‘WE WERE SURPRISED THERE
WERE INCIDENTS. WE FELT GUILTY
THAT THE MOVIE CAUSED THAT’
MICHAEL BECK
about making films and everything, I was always asked
about Ma^yPZkkbhkl.” He adds, “And they never asked me
about violence.”
Beck dates his own appreciation of the movie’s
longevity to the late ’90s, when a buddy of his then
15-year-old son exclaimed, “Oh man! You’re the dude
that played Swan in The Warriors!” Beck says: “This was
before videogames came out about it or before the 25th
anniversary stuff. That was when I knew for the first time
this was a cult movie – because it had now skipped
generations.”
Says Gordon of the phenomenon that resulted
from his perusal of a coverless paperback decades
ago: “In my office I have one-sheets of all the
movies I’ve produced and when people come in,
they say, ‘You made The Warriors?’ That’s the
first thing they say. And there’s some pretty big
hits up on the wall.” CF
 1970s
JODIE
FOSTER
CHILD STAR. TWO-TIME BEST ACTRESS
WINNER. FILMMAKER. 1N 2011, WE SPOKE
TO JODIE FOSTER
owards the end of The
T
Beaver, Jodie Foster’s
intimately played

drama about a
depressed man who
copes with the world
by interacting via a ratty hand puppet, the
tormented family at the film’s heart ride
a rollercoaster with joyful abandon. It’s
an apt metaphor that applies as easily to
Foster’s own momentous life as it does to
The Beaver’s nutty Black clan, who have
had to learn how to embrace life’s awful
downs as well as its euphoric ups.
Spin the peaks and troughs of her
career into a theme-park rollercoaster
experience and the G forces might rip your
head off: a mother-ruled childhood as
Coppertone babe, Disney sprite and Taxi
Driver’s child hooker; the celebrity
obsession of a failed presidential assassin,
who watched her career slide into oblivion
while sharpening her mind at Yale; the
unlikely comeback as a two-time Oscar
victor who used her Silence Of The Lambs
success to try comedy and corsets with
diminishing returns; the re-upping as
Hollywood’s modern-day female warrior;
and the directorial career that enjoyed
early success before being plagued by
stillborn projects and wounded stars, as
when Russell Crowe limped off her
long-gestating circus love story Flora Plum
two weeks before shooting.
The Beaver should have changed
Foster’s behind-camera luck. Not just
REX
CLASSIC FILM | THE 1970S
WOR DS MAT T MUELLER
a one-time topper on Hollywood’s Black
List of the best unproduced screenplays
but a smart, darkly comic drama that
would play to her strengths, star hot
young things Anton Yelchin and Jennifer
Lawrence and wrangle Mel Gibson on his
own comeback trail for a moving, afflicted
role that had Oscar stamped on it. Only for
Gibson to go and royally fuck the release
of his loyal, longtime friend’s film when
an ugly, raging tirade against ex-girlfriend
Oksana Grigorieva went public. With
Foster finding her third outing as a
director well and truly skinned before its
public unveiling, we expected to come
face to face with the angriest woman in
Hollywood when we met her at LA’s
Four Seasons in 2011.
What we got instead was an actress
whose grin and mood are easily a match
for her rollercoaster-romping Beaver
family. Sporting black slacks and a
shimmering grey satin blouse under a
fitted black jacket, Foster gripped our hand
and joshed like an old friend while various
minders ushered us out onto the patio to
escape the room’s ridiculously Arctic
conditions. “It’ll be fine for you – you’re
from England. You guys wear bikinis in
this kind of weather,” jokes Foster.
Warm, smiling, effusively friendly
– this full-on charm offensive could feel
like an attempt to disperse the Gibsonian
cloud hovering over The Beaver. But, in
fact, there’s no doubt that Jodie Foster,
2011, differed from the Foster we
previously encountered in Paris in 2005.
She seems more laid-back than the
slightly stiff actress who greeted us back
then. Leaning forward, Foster plants her
steady gaze in our direction; ready, willing
and supremely able to talk up an articulate
storm about Gibson, The Beaver and an
illustrious career…
How are you feeling about The Beaver
now that it’s about to be unleashed
on the world?
It’s been a long haul. It’s such a long haul
as a director, it’s so many different
feelings that go into it and it’s hard to
erase all the difficulties and all the
drama, but I’m really proud of it. I love
the film. I know it’s a strange movie and
it has an odd tone to it but I love that and
I embrace that and I felt like that was
the point.
What did you respond to in the script?
So many things. What touched me was the
entire dramatic narrative which, for
whatever reason, was not what other
people saw. A lot of people glossed over
that part and thought it was a quirky
comedy but that wasn’t how I saw it at all.
[SPOILER ALERT!] Jennifer Lawrence
told us when she spoke to you during
the editing process, you said the film
was turning out darker than expected…
I always thought it would [laughs]. You
know, a guy saws his arm off. In a way, you

 1970s
NY
STORY
A
young
Foster
with
co-star
Robert
De
Niro
and
director
Martin
Scorsese
on
the
set
of
TaxiDriver
have to work backwards. If you want the film
to be moving and if you want to have a sense
of what clinical depression feels like, then
you have to honour that. So we had to go
back and tame the comedic aspects.
It seems astonishing that this is your first
film as a director in 16 years, although
Flora Plum had a big hand in that. Is that
the film that got away?
It is but, you know, we shut down two weeks
before shooting and I put it back together
twice after that. I can honestly say I feel like
I’ve made that movie. I don’t think it will
ever happen now.
But you’ve been itching to get back
behind the camera?
Definitely, and for a long time. I feel like I
have to engineer things differently so that
I don’t take another 16 years to direct a
movie [Foster has since directed 2016’s
Money Monster]. It’s been hard finding
something and it’s been hard getting stuff
off the ground. I make personal movies and
those are hard to get off the ground.
Do you feel like you have a
definable aesthetic?
It depends on the movie. I’m not one of
those [directors] where I say, “I only want it
to be blue.” But I like films that are lean,
meticulously planned and witty, but where
I can go back and erase all the seams. The
progression of the visuals in this movie is
phenomenally calculated but hopefully by
the time the audience sees it, they’re not
paying attention.
CLASSIC FILM | THE 1970S
Did you always like the title?
Loved the title. My friends were always
saying, “So you’re going to change the title,
right?” And I’d say, “Absolutely not!” I love
people’s faces when they say, “What’s the
name of your movie?” and I say, “The
Beaver.” It’s irreverent and I think you have
to have an irreverent spirit to enjoy the film.
It’s not for everybody. It’s challenging.
As an actor, have you consciously stepped
away from the screen recently or is it just
harder to find roles?
It’s always hard and, you know, I’ve been
working for 45 years so you naturally slow
down when you get older. The thing that
interests me the most now is working with
great directors, standing behind their
shoulders and going, “Wow, why did he do
it that way?” and being able to serve them.
That’s the thing that’s keeping me in there.
You know, Spike Lee and David Fincher and
Neil Jordan… Really, the last 15 movies that
I’ve done have all been about that.
Do you think a film like Taxi Driver would
ever get made these days?
That’s a good question… I think it could ’cos
it was made for less than a million dollars
but the way it was released would be very
different. At that time, they put that movie
out in two theatres and let it grow and it was
in the theatre for close to a year. We don’t
have that any more. But the whole digital
revolution that’s happening means that, in
the next three years, film is going to be in a
very different place and movies like Taxi
Driver will be made way more often. Yes,
I KEPT MY OSCARS
IN THE BATHROOM
BUT THEY STARTED
GETTING CORRODED
we’re going to have to get used to the fact
that the only movies that are going to be in
theatres are event films that I’m gonna pay
50 bucks for me and my kids to go see. But
the $100m romantic comedy shot in Encino
is going to be playing in exactly the same
screen as the $100,000 version of Taxi Driver
and one of them’s really good...
When young actresses are interviewed,
your name invariably comes up as an
influence…
[Laughs] That’s nice. I don’t see myself as
much of a role model but I’ve had a really
long career and that’s the hardest thing for
young actors. My mom always said, “Look,
by the time you’re 18, your career will be
over.” And then she’d say, “By the time
you’re 26, your career will be over.” And
then it was, “By the time you’re 40, your
career will be over.” I managed to stay alive, I
guess. My mom’s not saying much anymore.
What do you make now of the fearless
girl who unzipped Robert De Niro’s
pants? Does it shock you?
Not at all! I just feel incredibly lucky. To have

come from making Disney movies to
working with the greatest director that
America’s ever had, except for maybe Frank
Capra – how amazing is that? No, I just felt
really lucky to be there and I have to hand it
to my mom because she was really forward
thinking. She was a great cinephile. She
made me watch Mean Streets at 10 years old
way before I ever worked with Scorsese.
Perhaps it was a vicarious thrill that she got
through me but she wanted to be respected
and she wanted me to be respected; she
wasn’t interested in me being a pig-tailed,
model-type actress, she wanted me to be up
there with Robert De Niro.
At what age will you let your sons watch
Taxi Driver?
Oh, they’re so not ready. They were not
interested in ever seeing my movies. I’d pull
the videos out and they would just be like,
“Argghhhh!” Up until this year, they’d only
seen Nim’s Island and Bugsy Malone. I showed
them Contact a couple of weeks ago and they
started becoming interested, so maybe
they’re ready to see my movies!
You’ve talked before about feeling
convinced that you’d blown your career
with your performance in The Accused
– until the Academy changed your mind.
Well, there was that but also, that film had
a hard path. The first cut didn’t work and
they got a brand new editor in and went
back to the printed takes. So it was a tough
movie to get right and even my
performance was tough to get right. I was
25 years old and there was something I was
ashamed of, something I didn’t quite
understand, about my unconscious choices.
I was drawn to portraying her in a way that
was uncomfortable and uncharming and
not sympathetic, she wasn’t the kind of
girl that I’m used to and I had a hard time
with that at 25. Since then I’ve understood
that it was good that I could only play that
but at the time, I thought, “What’s wrong
with me that I can’t do what everybody else
wants me to?”
How do you think The Silence Of The Lambs
holds up? Have all the parodies robbed it
of its menace?
Oh no, I love it. It’s a great movie. I think it’s
a great homage when something enters into
the consciousness that way.
When Total Film interviewed you in 2005,
you said you liked Red Dragon and
Manhunter but didn’t want to comment
on Hannibal even though you’d seen it.
Would you care to comment now?
It’s just different, you know, and there were
all sorts of reasons that Jonathan Demme
was uncomfortable making that movie and
Dino De Laurentiis and Ridley Scott weren’t.
And I think all those reasons are still on
screen and each of them is incredibly happy
about the decision that they made –
Jonathan’s really happy with the decision he
made and Ridley’s really pleased with the
decision that he made.
Wasn’t it strange watching another
actress inhabit the role that in many ways
defined your career?
It was interesting to see what her idea was
of where Clarice would be – who was Clarice
going to be 10 years from now? And it
wasn’t just interesting to see Julianne’s
idea but also the writer’s idea – I was like,
[gobsmacked] “Really?!” It’s not where
I thought she would be.
Where do you keep your Oscars?
I kept them in the bathroom but they started
getting corroded so they’re in a trophy case.
Oscars corrode?
Yeah, the little bottoms… They get all green
and humidity eats away at them.
Do they mean as much to you now as they
did when you first won them?
The things themselves don’t. It’s just the
idea of it, being a part of something that was
such a huge part of my childhood. But, I don’t
know, the Oscars feel different now. Maybe
it’s because I’m older or because there are so
few films that I feel are life-changing now.
You’ve never been afraid to have long
career gaps – but have any of those
hiatuses come because you found it hard
to shake off a character?
I think you get affected by the subject of the
last movie and how much blood went into it.
You’re ready when you’re ready. You know
when you’re ready because you find
something and you fall in love with it and
you know you’re not ready when you can’t
find anything to fall in love with… Of all the
JODIE FOSTER
movies I’ve had a hard time casting off, The
Brave One was the hardest to walk away from.
Why was that?
[Long pause] I think it switched a light bulb
off in my head that made me evolve
differently personally and then I just didn’t
want to… go back.
Can you talk more about that?
I don’t really understand it. I think it was the
character. I think there was something so
true that I had never really explored before
and it made me never want to go back to,
uh… the easy path. It’s a hard path [voice
catching in throat]… and it’s not easily
understandable by other people. I guess that
was it – being OK with having your
performances not be that understandable.
I just don’t think people got it but there was
such a shift in terms of what I learned on
that movie. I said to my agent, “Be prepared
for me to make a lot of movies that people
aren’t gonna like [laughs].”
How do you approach acting now – do
you wait for filmmakers to get in contact
or do you go after the roles you want?
It’s a combination of all things. I don’t have
a company anymore [Foster folded Egg

Productions in 2001] so I don’t develop
scripts for me as an actor and I never will
again. I’m not that good at it, I’m better at
developing other people’s movies. So that’s
done. Mostly what I’m working on is trying
to find a movie to direct and if something
happens as an actor, then I’m open to that
but I’m much more focused on directing now.
Do you think you’ll branch out into other
genres, or stick to stories strongly
focused on family dynamics?
I don’t think the two have to be divorced
from each other. The Silence Of The Lambs has
family dynamics and Panic Room does and
with all of those movies, I would think about
how I would make them while we were
shooting. As I always say, my version of
Panic Room would be a 25-day shoot and cost
about $150,000.
Are you driven by the same things that
fuelled you 15, 20 years ago or have the
goalposts changed?
Yeah, they change all the time. Hopefully
you evolve as a person and who you were
when you were 10 or 12 or 20, hopefully that
changes over time. I do feel proud that
there’s a signature to what I do. Even as an
actor, there’s a signature and the pattern
shows itself to me as well as it does to other
people. And, you know, you change but
you’re still etching from the same paradigm.
It’s still the same person in there trying to
get out, trying to figure it all out… CF
THE 1970S | CLASSIC FILM
 1970s


 JAWS

CLASSIC
MOVIE

jaws
Spielberg’s proto-blockbuster.
It will never be safe to go back
in the water… WORDSCERITHOMAS
veryone knows the story of Bruce, the little robot


E
shark that couldn’t. “It was like a wake,” was
how Steven Spielberg’s director buddy Brian
De Palma described watching the first rushes
of the mechanical fish in almost-action.
“Bruce’s eyes crossed and his jaws wouldn’t close
right.” And those were the takes where it moved
at all, rather than simply sinking. After a long silence in the
screening room, actor Richard Dreyfuss was first to speak:
“If any of us had any sense, we’d all bail out now.”
Poor malfunctioning Bruce wasn’t the only problem the
Jaws shoot faced, and Dreyfuss wasn’t alone in worrying
that this summer movie could just turn out to be “the
turkey of the year”. The producers might have splashed
the cash to buy up the rights to Peter Benchley’s fishy

NEED TO KNOW
YEARRUNNINGTIMEminutesDIRECTORStevenSpielberg
STARSRoyScheider RichardDreyfuss RobertShawTAGLINE
“You’ll nevergointhewateragain”BESTLINE“Thethingaboutashark 
it’sgotlifelesseyes blackeyes likeadoll’seyesWhenitcomesatyouit
doesn’tseemtobelivin’…untilhebitesyou andthoseblackeyesroll
over white”–QuintCRITIC’SVIEW“Anmillionfilmofconsummate
suspense tensionandterror”–VarietyBESTWATCHED…After
you’ve justgonepaddlingNotbeforeDefinitelynotbefore

THE 1970S | CLASSIC FILM

 CLASSIC MOVIE
bestseller, but by mid-shoot, nobody would have bet a
chocolate dubloon on Jaws being a hit.
Co-star Robert Shaw thought the novel was “a piece of
shit” and only took the part because his missus liked the
script. The crew were constantly being badgered by unhappy
Martha’s Vineyard locals. Yachts kept wrecking takes by
drifting into shot. The boat playing Quint’s Orca barely stayed
afloat. Everything cost three times as much as expected and
took twice as long to shoot. Spielberg was petrified by how
badly things were going. Explaining why, unlike the rest of
the crew, he didn’t take even a day of holiday during shooting
at Martha’s Vineyard, he said, “I was afraid if I left, I’d never
have gone back.” He was only half-joking.

omehow, though, the boy wonder overcame it all.

S He took that Martha’s Vineyard footage, additional

takes shot in the Pacific and even a few reshoots
done in editor Verna Field’s swimming pool (the
head popping out of the bottom of the boat was
redone there because Spielberg wanted audiences
to “scream louder”) and did more than just make it work.
He assembled it into a genre-defining shocker.
How? Well, part of it’s clearly down to the decision forced
upon him by the twitchy “Bruce” (there were actually three
models depending on what kind of movement was needed).
With John Williams’ primal, pulsing music slathered over the
top – and Spielberg wasn’t sure about that to begin with
either, famously asking Williams if the theme was a joke the
first time he heard it – a disaster became a nerve-shredding
triumph. As copycat filmmakers the world over have realised

in the years since, not seeing the damn shark and letting
audience imaginations thrash rampantly about on their seats
turns out to be so much more effective.
Another part of it is undoubtedly down to the way his leads
interacted. We’ll never know for sure, but you can’t help
having a sneaking suspicion that literally being stuck together
on an island may have helped, not hindered performances.
Dreyfuss and Shaw weren’t keen on each other to start with,
and Scheider really was nervy about being out on a boat (he
hid emergency axes around the ship in case he got trapped for
real during the sinking sequence). Throw in days turning into
weeks turning into months bobbing, swimming and sinking
on the ocean blue together, and suddenly the muttering
SWIM-TIMEAbove
Susan Backlinie as ‘I KEPT WAITING FOR THE NEXT
Chrissie Watkins
tension of the early scenes and the scowling one-upmanship
on the shark hunt seem as much to do with the arduous Jaws’ first victim WEEKEND TO DROP OFF AND IT
conditions as painstaking rehearsal or thespy skill. But – and
EVERYBODYOUT DIDN’T, IT WENT UP AND WENT UP’
Left You’ll never go
to the beach again… STEVEN SPIELBERG
this is a huge, shark-sized “but” – the biggest reason that
Jaws works and works so damn brilliantly is Spielberg himself.
At the time, critics struggled to accept that someone as
young as Stevie – 26 when he was hired and doing only his
second cinematic feature, after all – could possibly have
orchestrated that opening shark attack on the swimmer with
such tidal force. Surely a relative beginner couldn’t have
pulled off the audacious reverse dolly zoom (the bullet-time
of its day)? Or balanced the humour with the horror so
effectively that you almost forget this is a film about a
flesh-mangling monster of the deep?
He did, though. Fields was certainly a huge help (she along
with John Williams and the sound crew bagged the film’s only
Oscars), but, as the three decades since show only too clearly,
Jaws has Spielberg’s stamp all over it. His innate feel for
pacing a story, his skill at judging the climax of a scene, his

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1970S

 JAWS

BITE ME
Jawstakesabite
outofHollywood
asothermovies
“payhomage”…
THESPYWHO
LOVEDME
Jaws–thegiantwith
thesteelchoppers 
thatis–survivesa
finalexplosionand
facesalongswimto
shoreCoincidence?
Wethinknot…

AIRPLANE!

TheZuckerboys’
fin-in-cheekshotof
a plane’stailcutting
throughtheclouds
accompaniedby
JohnWilliams’music

MOUNTAINS
OFTHEMOON
 
BobRafelson’s
underratedVictorian
adventuremovieisn’t
whereyou’dexpect
toseeaJawstribute 
buthowelsedoyou
explainthescene
whereexplorers
Burtonand
Livingstonestart
comparingscars?

THEUSUAL
unerring ability to know how long to stretch out his hold over it would make good money on the opening weekend and then SUSPECTS
an audience but still shock them when he snaps away… those die. They were half right. Thetitlemaybe
are skills he’s had since the very beginning and Jaws “My secretary handed me this piece of paper and said, a homageto
Casablanca but
showcases them to perfection. ‘Here’s the opening figures.’ And I just stared at this number,” Bad HatHarry 
remembers Spielberg. “Then I kept waiting for the next Bryan Singer’s
f course, it also boasts signs of what’s gone on weekend to drop off and it didn’t; it went up and it went up.” productioncompany 

O to become his weaker side: his love of
sentiment, his desire to shape everything into
a happy ending, his overreliance on the
cash-heavy “big shot” – but crucially in Jaws
they’re still a part of the overall package, bits
of his game that feed into the film but don’t ever capsize it.
Think about it; no one ever questions Dreyfuss’ survival at
the end in the way they do the son in War Of The Worlds. It’s
a moment to cheer, not jeer.
Universal tried everything to get Spielberg to cut spiralling
costs during filming, including asking him not to reshoot
shots where you could see leisure craft in the background
(“We couldn’t do it,” Spielberg said. “You have three guys out
in a rickety boat hunting a killer shark. What kind of menace
is there going to be if there is a family of four only 50 feet
away, having a picnic on their sailboat?”). Then, thinking it
was a guaranteed stinker, they threw Spielberg’s movie into
more than 400 theatres simultaneously. The theory was that
REX
Jaws eventually took $129 million in the US, a record that was isareferencetoaline
fromJaws“That’s
only beaten when Star Wars came along two years later. Before
somebadhat Harry ”
Jaws, the good films were drip-fed out on a small number of Brodydeadpansto
prints to “build a platform”. After Jaws, they all got huge TV a fellawearinga
and marketing pushes and came out in as many theatres at bathinghat
once as possible. It was the film that taught studios that a
GODZILLA
mass opening might save shoddy movies from themselves, Unseenmonster 
but it can turn the great films into blockbusters. It’s the lesson two oldmensitting
that’s shaped the Hollywood summer ever since. fishingonapier 
These days, Spielberg still maintains that Schindler’s List “We’regoingtoneed
abiggergun”…the
is his best film. He’s wrong. Jaws is a decapitated head and
list goesonThere’s
shoulders above everything else he has ever produced. It’s evenareversedolly
as slick as Raiders Of The Lost Ark, does shocks better than zoomthrowninfor
Jurassic Park, marries the domestic to the dramatic with as goodmeasure
much elegance as Close Encounters and pulls you, kicking and
screaming, into its world from the moment that… well,
someone first starts kicking and screaming. All together
now: dur-dum, dur-dum, dur-dum… CF

THE 1970S | CLASSIC FILM



CLASSIC FILM | THE 1980S

 1980s 

THE SWEET SMELL OF EXCESS…

THIS DECADE SAW BLOCKBUSTERS GET
BIGGER, BRASHER AND BOLDER
WORDSMATTMAYTUM

THE 1980S | CLASSIC FILM

 A fter the often grim and frequently gritty decade that preceded
it, the 1980s proved to be a treasure trove of trashy cinema,
guilty pleasures and dizzyingly high concepts. In an era
where fashion was defined by gaudy excess, and the US was
surging on an economic boom, the film scene was brasher
and bolder than ever, and there were far-reaching
developments in the way movies were made and consumed.
Looking back, it’s no surprise that some of the most
memorable, cult-worshipped movies and franchises got
their start in the ’80s.
Against the backdrop of a United States boosted by its
president’s “Reaganomics” plan, and with the advent of MTV
(launched in 1981), consumers were guzzling more content

than ever before. The bitesize music video offered inhalable
entertainment, and the rise of cable TV and proliferation of
VHS technology were providing ever more home-viewing
options. Capitalism was booming, so it’s no surprise that
movies became a bigger commodity than ever. The fast food

10
model pioneered by McDonald’s was dominating the
restaurant industry, and Hollywood was about to learn
a lesson about the power of “franchising”.
It’s pertinent to start looking at the story of 1980s cinema
with a franchise favourite that was arguably the first
super-sequel, and the biggest film of 1980, not to mention
a still-beloved fan favourite. Star Wars was born in the ’70s,
Films That
but its world-building expansion began in earnest in 1980,
with The Empire Strikes Back. Of course, sequels had existed
before 1980, but none had the series-creating magnitude of
Defined A Decade
Empire, which was key to securing the future of a saga that’s
still going strong today. The film still serves as a template
 
1 BACKTOTHEFUTURE
RobertZemeckis’snearfaultlesstime-travelcomedyhasaged
for the best sequels, hitting the ground running and
deepening and darkening its themes. In business terms
though, it proved just how powerful packaged properties
1 fromhereon everyfilmwaspitchedas“DieHardona…”
CLASSIC FILM | THE 1980S
exceptionallywellthankstoitsownnostalgictreatmentofthes
Typifiesthe’swithitshighconceptandyounglead
 
2 ETTHEEXTRA-TERRESTRIAL
Thebiggestfilmofthedecade it’sadazzlingtechnical
achievementthatalsohasahugeglowingredheartMocaptechstill
strugglestocompetewiththiswide-eyedpuppetmarvel
3 GHOSTBUSTERS
Theydon’tmake’emlikethisanymoreunlesstheyremake
them Middle-agedeverydudeheroes anarchiclaughs genuine
scares  anda mascotSlimerwhobecomesiconicwithonlyseconds
of screentime
4 TOPGUN
ConfirmsCruise’sstarpowerwhiletakingyourbreathaway
DirectorTonyScottmadethefighter-jetactionsoar butmuchcredit
is duetopowerproducersDonSimpsonandJerryBruckheimer
5 DIEHARD
Thiscontained claustrophobicthrillerrecalledclassicdisasterpics
initstower-blocksetting butcreatedanewtemplateforactioncinema
 1980s

could be, and throughout the rest of the decade studios

would tap into their movies’ sequel potential. Lucasfilm led
the way with Star Wars (Return Of The Jedi followed in 1983)
and Raiders Of The Lost Ark, which got the boulder rolling on
the Indiana Jones series in 1981, but many more would soon
follow suit. Of the 10 highest grossing films of the 1980s,
only one would never have a sequel (presuming Top Gun 2
eventually does get made, as Tom Cruise recently promised).
That standalone film at the top of the 1980s chart is
Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. The 1982 sci-fi
classic proved the Berg with the Beard was a master
storyteller with an eye for an all-ages crowdpleaser and
an instinct for a box-office hit. The film also helped to
establish Amblin Entertainment (founded by Spielberg,

Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall), a production
company whose name defines the vibe of a particular type
of ’80s film, the type of which is now frequently referenced
by directors in the present day who grew up on those films
(see J.J. Abrams’ Super 8, for example). Among the key
2 films that define the Amblin tone are 1984’s Gremlins, and
1985’s The Goonies and Back To The Future. Featuring
recognisable visions of Americana, and young protagonists
in fantastical situations, Amblin ushered in a new breed of
edgy-but-still-family-friendly fare.

pielberg wasn’t the only director to be working on

S big-idea sci-fi, a genre that flourished with the

1980s’ advances in practical effects, and the fears
of AIDS and nuclear war that were prominent in
western culture. David Cronenberg made many of his most
distinctly “Cronenbergian” pictures during the decade,
including Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly and Dead Ringers.
With his trademark queasy body horror and metaphors
3 made flesh, it remains the definitive portion of his oeuvre.
Ridley Scott pushed boundaries in serious sci-fi with his
vision of a noirish future LA in Blade Runner: oft-imitated,
it’s never yet been bettered. Meanwhile, James Cameron,
a director who still knows a thing or two about pulling in
punters with ambitious sci-fi material, made a name for
himself with the none-more-lean time-travel chase movie,
The Terminator (1984), itself a franchise-spawner. He’d go on
to give the ’80s treatment (bigger, louder, more violent) to
Alien sequel Aliens (1986). Advances in practical effects and
puppetry helped give life to E.T., the Gremlins and John
Carpenter’s The Thing, with otherworldly characterisation
that has stood the test of time. In the later part of the
decade, Cameron pushed CGI to new limits with The Abyss,
but the technology wouldn’t take off until the ’90s.
4 Audiences, and computer processing units, arguably weren’t

THE 1980S | CLASSIC FILM

 CLASSIC DECADE
6

quite ready for it, as Tron’s underpowered graphics and

disappointing box-office had suggested in 1982.
The flourishing of franchise fare was noticeable in the
new breed of action star that would define the ’80s. Look at
Sylvester Stallone’s major characters. In the ’80s, Rocky went
from downtrodden underdog to bulging-veined superstar,
and Rambo went from traumatised Vietnam vet to one-man
army, his rippling, tanned physique an emblem of ’80s
excess. For some critics, the transformation of Rambo and
Rocky exposes the worst of the decade’s qualities, with
subtlety nowhere to be found. For others, the OTT frills and
thrills are the perfect companion to popcorn. Audiences
were certainly lapping it up, and Stallone’s biggest rival,
Arnold Schwarzenegger, also had his heyday in the ’80s. An


Austrian immigrant bodybuilder flexing, bench-pressing and

power-lifting his way to the American dream, Arnie had only
done documentary appearances and small-fry roles before
the ’80s, when the Conan movies brought him to a wider
7
audience and The Terminator made him an international icon
by making a virtue of his unusual accent, monotone delivery
and imposing presence. He became a genre unto himself, his
name on the poster on the likes of Commando (1985), Predator
(1987) and The Running Man (1987) promising extravagant
action scenes, bulletproof one-liners and an unstoppable
man machine of a hero.
Arnie and Sly weren’t the only movie stars whose stock
went up in the ’80s. Tom Cruise made his screen debut in
1981, and before the decade was up he was Oscar-nominated
and one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars. Showing the
relentless drive and business savvy that many later movie
stars would hope to emulate, Cruise made a beeline for the
directing greats (Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese,
Ridley Scott), and smartly balanced cheeky comedy (Risky
8
Business) with action blockbusters (Top Gun) and awards-
bating drama (Rain Man, Born On The Fourth Of July). He set a
new bar for stars who could play any number of genres, and
charm the hell out of the publicity circuit, demonstrating as
big a personality off screen as on.
Cruise, Schwarzenegger and Stallone might have
represented chiselled, superhuman perfection on the big
screen, but the ’80s were also a breeding ground for a
different type of movie lead. As well as the youngsters
of Amblin, stars like Eddie Murphy could also shine.
A stand-up supernova, Murphy transplanted his
wisecracking, motormouth comedy persona directly into
the movies, starting with 48 Hrs (1982), and following up
with Trading Places (1983), sequel-spawning megahit
;^o^keryAbeel<hi(1984) and Coming To America (1988).
Whether the genre was gritty crimer, action-thriller or
9
REX

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1980S

 1980s
all-out comedy, Murphy would play a loose variation of
himself, and audiences couldn’t get enough.
A new type of star frequently emerged from television
origins – Tom Hanks being a stellar example. Plucked
from TV bit parts by director Ron Howard for boy-meet-
mergirl-romcom Splash (1984), he was a schlubby,
frequently frazzled everyman; a James Stewart-type reborn

10 Films That Defined for the decade’s bolder, brasher output. Big (1988) was the,
ahem, biggest of all Hanks’s hits, typifying the high-concept
that was king in this decade, and the role of a 12-year-old

A Decade cont... kid trapped in a 30-year-old’s body played to his manchild

strengths. Yep, if you could pitch a comedy film in an
elevator, you could get it made in the ’80s. Gag-a-minute

6 WHOFRAMEDROGERRABBIT
Verymuchofitstime–asCGIwouldsoonreplace
hand-drawnanimation–thislive-actionhybridisstillseamless
entertainmentAsubversiveinfluenceonanyonewho’sriffed
on establishedcharacters
disaster movie spoof? Airplane! (1980). Australian bushman
lost in New York City? Crocodile Dundee (1986). Bachelors
left to look after an infant? Three Men And A Baby (1987).
Scientist dad accidentally miniaturising his offspring?
Ahg^r%yBLakngdMa^Db]l (1989).

 
7 THEBREAKFASTCLUB
JohnHughes’heartfelthigh-schooldramaistheonlyfilmto
hostbusters (1984) also took the formula of TV

G
makeyouwishfordetention asitskewerscharactertropesthe
jock thenerd thepopulargirlwithwarmthandsincerity comedy stars (mostly from Saturday Night Live),
and high concept (the title says it all) for ’80s

 
8 BLUEVELVET
DavidLynch’sLynchiestfilmever?Thirtyyearsonitstill
enthrallsanddisturbs asitusesnoirconventionstoliftthelid
success. Also aided by burgeoning advances in
practical effects, Ghostbusters represents what is so beloved
on AmericansuburbiaDennisHopperwasneverscarier about the 1980s’ biggest cult hits, in that it’s effectively a
family film, but with far bigger scares and edgier humour

 
9 DOTHERIGHTTHING
SpikeLeeannouncedhimselfasoneofthemajorvoices
of theerawiththissearing provocative energisingwork 
than you’d get in similar “four-quadrant” blockbusters in
the decades to follow. The introduction of the PG-13 rating
which examinesracerelationsthroughtheprismofone in 1984 would help blockbusters to straddle that adults-only/
Brooklyn neighbourhood  family-friendly divide, after a minor furore had been caused
by the scarier scenes in Gremlins and Bg]bZgZyChg^l:g]Ma^

 
10 DEADRINGERS
TheFlyandVideodromemighthavehadmoreindelible
imagery butDeadRingerslingerslongestoutofDavid
Temple Of Doom.
The rise of VHS – which also saw banned “Video Nasty”


Cronenberg’s’soeuvreQueasilycreepy withanastonishing horrors swapped, circulated and obsessed over – might have
dualperformancefromJeremyIrons helped encourage the surge in raunchy teen comedies
prevalent in the ’80s. Fast Times At Ridgemont High (1982)
10 featured Phoebe Cates in one of the most paused video
moments ever, while Porky’s and Revenge Of The Nerds showed
there was mileage for sequels from ribald teen comedies. Be
thankful for John Hughes then, whose sensitive teen flicks
would be among the definitive films of the decade. With a
unique ability to capture adolescent issues without
trivialising them, he wrote and directed Sixteen Candles (1984),
The Breakfast Club (1985) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986),
each with enduring teen protagonists who’ve outlived their
fashions to still resonate today.
While bawdy teen flicks and OTT-actioners were
dominating the box-office, awards bodies were staying away
from the trashy material clearly so popular with audiences
and rewarding the worthiest of prestige pictures. Ordinary
People (1980), Chariots Of Fire (1981) and Gandhi (1982) were
among the Academy’s Best Picture winners; strong films
all, but hardly the material ’80s film fans will turn to as
definitive of a decade of excess. As is frequently the case,
time has proved awards bodies to be somewhat out of touch
with the zeitgeist, opting for classical material over films
that embody their precise moment in history.
And as the decade drew to a close, 1989’s Batman proved
prophetic for years to come. The first step towards “darker”
comic-book movies for adults – which could still be
merchandised towards kids too young to see the film – it also
began a trend of quirky indie directors being tapped up to
helm huge franchise blockbusters. An underdog story for
director Tim Burton; an iconic hero heading up a franchise
powerhouse; edgy maniacal comedy from the Joker: it’s
basically the ’80s in a nutshell. CF

THE 1980S | CLASSIC FILM

 1980s
AS RIDLEY SCOTT’S SCI-FI NOIR MASTERPIECE CELEBRATES THREE-
AND-A-HALF DECADES THIS YEAR, WE UNCOVER 35 FASCINATING
 FACTS ABOUT THIS TIMELESS CLASSIC...
WORDSSAMASHURST
01
Philip K. Dick got the idea to write Do Androids Dream
Of Electric Sheep? when, during a research period at
the University Of California, he found a Nazi journal
written by a concentration camp SS officer, who
complained: “The screams of children keep me
awake at night.” Dick couldn’t believe that a human could
disconnect enough from reality / emotion enough to complain
they couldn’t get a good night sleep because people were being
exterminated around them, and the concept of a synthetic
human was born.
02
Producer Michael Deeley was attracted to both the
originality of the screenplay (which, at that point,
was titled Dangerous Days), and the fact it presented
a plausible version of the future, a reality he could
see coming to pass. Deeley believed Ridley Scott
had the best eye of any director working at that time and, because
Blade Runner had to “look stunning” to work even on a basic
level, he approached him with the project.
03
Ridley Scott initially turned down Blade Runner
because he was committed to several other films
- including an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune.
But, when Scott’s older brother died, Ridley (as he
put it himself in the Channel 4 documentary On
The Edge Of Blade Runner,) “Freaked out. I felt I had to go to work,
immediately.” He called Deeley and agreed to do the project, on
the promise they would start production quickly.
CLASSIC FILM | THE 1980S
FACTS ABOUT
04
Hampton Fancher’s script went through a further
eight drafts before production started, with Scott
working closely with the writer to bring it closer to
the vision he had for the project. He felt Fancher’s
early drafts were too enclosed, with much of the
action taking place in Deckard’s apartment. At one point, Scott
encouraged Fancher to read French sci-fi comics magazine Metal
Hurlant (known in the UK as Heavy Metal) to help him build a
convincing future outdoor environment.
05
As Scott fought to complicate and expand the
physical world in which the story would take place,
he was simultaneously streamlining Fancher’s
narrative, removing several voiceover sequences.
Fancher was especially upset when David Peoples
was brought on to contribute a draft, a move which led him to
quit the project. “I got rat-fucked,” Fancher said later. “I was
insane. I wanted my name off the picture.”
06
David Peoples felt Scott wanted to create a sci-fi
Chinatown, a future noir far darker than (the hugely
popular) Star Wars, which was at its peak when
Blade Runner was being developed. According to
Peoples, Scott wanted “Something more
mysterious and foreboding and threatening.”
BLADE RUNNER



THE 1980S | CLASSIC FILM

 CLASSIC MOVIE

07
Scott later described Blade Runner as “a film set forty
years hence, made in the style of forty years ago.”
But he was dissatisfied with Fancher’s take on the
noir genre, describing it as “Philip Marlowe meets
The Stepford Wives.”

08
Scott encouraged Peoples to play with the language
of the future, requesting he come up with
replacement terms for words like “android”.
Fancher stumbled across William S Burroughs’
Blade Runner (A Movie) in his book collection, felt it
sounded a bit like ‘bounty hunter’ and bought the rights. The
term “Replicant” came from a suggestion by Peoples’
microbiologist daughter, who suggested he play with the
concept of replication.

09
Philip K. Dick, who hated Fancher’s drafts, loved
Peoples’ take on the material. “I couldn’t believe
what I was reading! The whole thing had simply
been rejuvenated in a very fundamental way. [The
screenplay and the novel] reinforce each other, so
that someone who started with the novel would enjoy the movie
and someone who started with the movie would enjoy the novel.
I was amazed that Peoples could get some of those scenes to
work. It taught me things about writing that I didn’t know.”

10
Fancher had originally pictured Robert Mitchum,
Christopher Walken, and Tommy Lee Jones as Rick
Deckard when he was writing the script. Scott’s first
choice was Dustin Hoffman, even though he didn’t

necessarily fit what was in the script. “I figured,
unlikely though he may be in terms of his physical size as a sci-fi
hero, as an actor Hoffman could do anything,” explained Scott.
“Therefore, it really didn’t matter.”

11 12
When Harrison Ford (Rick Deckard) first met Ridley
ABOVE
Scott, he was wearing a pretty distinctive outfit. Rutger Hauer (Roy Batty) agreed to do the project
Ridley Scot’s grubby
According to Scott: “He was wearing a leather jacket after Scott described his vision of the future.
aesthetic brought
and a wide-brimmed khaki hat, and he was “The future is old, it’s not new,” he told Hauer, atmosphere and
unshaven. Of course, he was Indiana Jones, he had who found the concept fascinating. texture to the future
come off the set to come and talk. I figured anything Spielberg ofBladeRunner

13
and Lucas were doing would be good for this actor. I thought
‘This is the guy, he’s going to help us.’” Scott’s attention to detail went as far as the film’s
screentests. According to Daryl Hannah (Pris):
“When we did the screentests, we had set-
dressing, there was rain machines, there was
smoke, an alleyway with garbage. It was lit like
you wouldn’t believe - I have yet to work on another film
that’s as well lit and as well designed as the screentests on this
film, it was insane.”

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1980S


14
Shooting the scene where Pris meets genetic
designer J.F. Sebastian (William Sanderson) for the
around
first time, Pris slips on the pavement and smashes
clings
on
for
her elbow through a car window. Hannah’s slip was
life
an accident that was kept in the film - the car
window was made of real glass. Hannah chipped her elbow in
eight places, but carried on with the take.
15
Special effects director Douglas Trumbull (the son
of Donald Trumbull, who directed The Wizard Of
Oz’s visual effects) who had previously turned
down the opportunity to work on Star Wars (an offer
he probably received thanks to the astonishing
work he did on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey), left
;eZ]^yKngg^khalfway through production, to direct his own
film, Brainstorm. When Brainstorm was received poorly, he left
the creative side of the film industry, moving into the technical
realm - Trumbull was a key figure in the development of
IMAX technology.
16
The film’s most iconic line “All those moments will
be lost in time, like tears in rain,” delivered by
Rutger Hauer’s replicant leader Roy Batty, was an
improvisation by the actor. Hauer felt the original
script was overblown, and heavily edited it down to
what we see onscreen, before adding one of the most quoted lines
in cinema history. The scene was shot at 3am, Hauer wrote the
line at 1am. “I thought it was beautiful,” Scott said.
BLADE RUNNER

17
According to Dick, the author and director had wildly ABOVE
different viewpoints when it came to the replicants. Hanging
“To me, the replicants are deplorable,” Dick said. Deckard
“They are essentially less than human entities. Ridley, dear
on the other hand, said he regarded them as
supermen who couldn’t fly. He said they were smarter, stronger
and had faster reflexes than humans. ‘Golly!’ that’s all I could
think of to reply to that one. I mean, Ridley’s attitude was quite a
divergence from my original point of view, since the theme of my
book is that Deckard is dehumanised through the tracking down
of the androids.”
18
Blade Runner appears to have a strange curse - every
corporation that paid for product placement in the
film (including Atari, Pan Am, RCA, Cuisinart, and
Bell Phones) suffered extreme losses in the years
following Blade Runner’s release. Even Coca-Cola
wasn’t safe from the curse, when, in 1985, their attempt at a
‘New Coke’ rebrand was a (very public) failure.
19
In addition to Vangelis’ ground-breaking and
hugely influential score, Scott licensed music from
Gail Laughton’s “Harps of the Ancient Temples”
and Japanese group Ensemble Nipponia’s
traditional pieces, to give the futuristic Los Angeles
more multicultural feel as Deckard moves through it.
Ensemble Nipponia’s music can be heard on the advertising
blimps in the film.
THE 1980S | CLASSIC FILM
 CLASSIC MOVIE

20
Academic Robert Barringer believes Blade Runner is
an allegory of slavery. In his essay “Skinjobs,
humans and racial coding”, Barringer says: “This is
a film in which the slaves are coded black, a film
which flaunts its vision of a multi-ethnic
metropolis,” in which it is “desirable and politically feasible to
construct a new race of slaves.” He goes further, suggesting each
replicant in the film is a version of individual offensive black
stereotypes (Leon - worker, Zhora - stripper, Pris - prostitute,
Rachael - Oreo, Roy - militant leader).

21
Designer Syd Mead has said his biggest challenge on
the film was the Voight-Kampff Machine. “In my
mind, it had to be terrifying,” he said. “This
machine was breathing because it inhaled the
localised air between the interview and interviewee,
and process that - picking up acidic traces, and so forth, much as
animals do - because animals can smell if you’re afraid. You
unfold the machine and it starts itself as soon as the subject
walks in the room; its arm moves around and focuses at the
subject’s eye. It’s sort of alive in a way all by itself, and its very,
very threatening.”

22
Harrison Ford believed he was playing a human
during the shoot, and not a replicant. “I thought it
was important that the audience be able to have a
human representative on screen, somebody that
they could have an emotional understanding of,”

Ford said later. “Ridley didn’t think that was all that important.”

23
The production was difficult for everyone involved,
partly because it involved so many night shoots.
According to Daryl Hannah: “We shot for five
months, and almost all of it was night shoots. I
don’t remember seeing the light of day, except the
last few minutes at the end of my drive home.” ABOVE

24
Man vs machine or

27
The shot was also difficult because of Ridley Scott’s machine vs machine?
perfectionism. According to James Hong (Chew): “I Scott’s patience gradually wore thin on set. Guess we’ll find out
could feel the pressure almost all of the time I was “Eventually, I became a screamer,” Scott confessed. in the sequel
on the set. [It’s] possibly one of the worst pressured “I got really angry. Which is not good, screaming
BELOW RIGHT
conditions I’ve ever been in. Every ounce of energy, doesn’t get you anywhere really, but it was out of
They may be bad but
every bit of concentration, was to create the scene [Scott] wanted frustration. I didn’t like the constant questions - I
they’re still cool
- and he wants perfection. In the most gentle, but demanding don’t mind ‘How are you doing this?’ but I don’t like ‘Why are
way, he would tell you what he wanted.” you doing this?’ Because I was pretty qualified by this point.”

25
Co-financier Bud Yorkin wasn’t impressed by
Scott’s intricate approach. “I think he was
indulgent. I saw thirteen, fourteen, fifteen takes at
a time - and I couldn’t tell the difference between
them. So I asked him, why are you doing it? And he
said ‘In the back, you see the shadow? I want a bigger shadow.’
28
Rutger Hauer sympathised with Ford’s situation, to
an extent. “The replicants are such great
characters, and Harrison Ford’s character is such a
dumb character - he gets a gun put to his head, and
then he fucks a dishwasher. And then he falls in
love with her! It doesn’t make any sense! He’s introduced as this

26
detective hero, but he’s not the hero, he’s the bad guy. His role
Scott and Ford constantly clashed during the shoot. didn’t seem to fit him, or he couldn’t make it fit. If he would
“It’s fair to say that Harrison and I were nearly have been stronger, I wouldn’t have been so shiny, you know?”

always quarrelling. I lay that partly at my feet,
partly because I was used to always getting my own
way,” Scott said. “I didn’t spend much time on
explanation and stroking, because I had too much to do, to get
what I want, because I had a performance as well. I’d spent a year
on Blade Runner, I knew it inside and out, all Harrison had to do
was trust me. But Harrison’s not used to working that way, and I
can understand that. I still believe it’s one of his best films.”
29
Following delays, which led to the project going
over budget, Deeley and Scott were fired. “We
were technically fired, we still came to work every
day, and worked. But, on paper, they didn’t require
our services any more. It was ill-mannered
rudeness - how were they going to finish the picture without the
director?” Deeley said later.

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1980S

 BLADE RUNNER

30
Philip K. Dick was unhappy with what he’d heard
about the film, until he was shown a 10 minute
reel of what Scott was achieving with the visual
effects. Dick’s reaction: “How is this possible? I
don’t understand this, this feels exactly like what
I had in my head when I was writing it, how does this happen?”
The author’s response gave the production team a boost at a
difficult time.

31 
Despite Dick’s enthusiasm, test audiences weren’t
as keen. According to Scott: “We sat around in the
manager’s office after the test screenings, and it was
rather bleak. Harrison was being positive, actually
- he said ‘I think they liked it!’ I said ‘I don’t know.’
We were waiting for the cards…” The cards, sadly, were not
positive, and extra voiceover work was scheduled to make sense
of the narrative.

32


Harrison Ford wasn’t a fan of the voiceover

narration (taken from earlier drafts of the script)
which he was forced to record against Scott’s
wishes. Ford said it was a “Fucking nightmare.
I thought that the film worked without the
narration. But now I was stuck recreating that narration. And
I was obliged to do the voiceovers for people that did not
represent the director’s interests.” It’s been long-rumoured
Ford deliberately delivered the additional dialogue as flatly as
possible, so that it would be unusable.

33
Still, at least the cast enjoyed the film. “I loved it,
I was really happy with it. I was really shocked
that it didn’t receive as much attention initially
as I thought it would,” Daryl Hannah said. “It’s
taken 20 years for people to appreciate it.”
Hauer, meanwhile, saw the writing on the wall. “I saw the
audience, they were split - it was like the red sea. There were
the people who were really stunned, then there were the people
who were pissed off. ‘It’s so depressing, that’s not my town!’ No
it’s not! Jesus!”

34
One of Ridley Scott’s original working titles for
the film was Gotham City, which makes us
wonder when he’s going to get around to making
a Batman movie.

35
Despite multiple versions of the film now available
to the public (including both a “director’s cut” and a
later “final cut”) Scott has said he’ll never feel the
film has been finished, comparing the experience of
working on the project to: “Finishing a painting -
you never really do. You still walk into a room and look at it.” CF

THE 1980S | CLASSIC FILM

 1980s



CLASSIC FILM | THE 1980S


familiar-looking figure in a trenchcoat
walks across a blasted desert
landscape, silhouetted against a hazily
burning sun. The gravelly voice that
tells us that replicants are like any
other machine, a benefit or a hazard,
rings bells with us as well. But this is not Rick
Deckard, the burnt-out “Blade Runner” who
hunted down errant artificial people in the
1982 Ridley Scott film adaptation of Philip K
Dick’s classic sci-fi novel Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep? And that’s not Harrison Ford
under the trenchcoat, it’s Ryan Gosling as K.
Welcome to Blade Runner 2049, the sequel
to one of the best-loved science fiction films
of all time. 35 years after the original we’re
finally ready to step back into that weathered
future. But what do we know so far about the
upcoming new film?
Well, nuts and bolts stuff first… This is,
like the first film, a Ridley Scott ball-game,
though he is Executive Producer on the film,
rather than Director. Those duties fall to
Denis Villeneueve, whose most recent credit
was last year’s first contact classic Arrival.
Blade Runner screenwriter Hampton Fancher,
now 78, is also back, sharing the screenplay
credit with Michael Green, co-writer on the
critically-acclaimed superhero flick Logan.
Promisingly, Villeneueve has stated that the
film will be Rated R in the US – indeed, it’s
one of the most expensive R films ever.
The action takes place 30 years after the
2019-set first film (now only two years away
in real life – ulp!) and if anything, Los Angeles
is even darker and more noir-ish than it was
when Deckard was pounding the mean streets
of the City of Angels. Gosling’s K seems to be
following in his predecessor’s world-weary
footsteps, not only is he another Blade
Runner, but he’s on the track of Deckard, who
has been missing since the events of the first
movie. At the end of that film we saw him
YEARS LATER
RIDLEY SCOTT’S MASTERPIECE IS FINALLY ABOUT
TO GET A SEQUEL. DAVID BARNETT SPECULATES
ON THE PLOT OF BLADE RUNNER 2049...
and replicant Rachael (Sean Young) disappear
off into the sunset. From the teaser we know
that K does indeed find Deckard. Here come
those actual gravelly tones that we remember
so well from Harrison Ford: “I did your job
once. I was good at it.” No kidding.
The teaser raises many questions: Where
has Deckard been hiding out for the past three
decades? Is Rachael with him? And what, we
wonder, does K want? To bring him to justice?
Or, as the official synopsis of the film states,
is it to do with the fact that K “unearths a
long-buried secret that has the potential to
plunge what’s left of society into chaos”?
From that, and the fact that the desert
landscape in which Deckard is hiding out
looks suitably post-apocalyptic, we can
deduce that things haven’t got much better
for the world since Deckard’s day in the sun
- or rather the rain-slicked streets.
And what of the replicants? Has technology
advanced a great deal in those 30 years to
create new, improved models? Or is society so
much on the slide the world is making do with
old tech? Is the Tyrrell Corporation still
churning them out? Whatever, we must
assume that replicants are still going wrong,
or K wouldn’t be in with a job.
REPLICANTS REBORN
One of the big questions left hanging by Blade
Runner was the suggestion that Deckard
himself might be a replicant, one of the
advanced Nexus-6 models like Rachael, who
believed herself to be human. But we were
told in the first movie that replicants only live
for four years and Deckard has aged
appropriately… does this mean the replicant
theory is wrong? Or that the bioengineering
on the Nexus-6 models incorporated ageing
into their physical make-up, allowing them a
much longer shelf-life.
BLADE RUNNER 2049
We certainly saw the batteries run down on
replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) who
finished off on his poetic “tears in rain”
monologue. But what can we expect of the
replicants in the new movie? There are no
clues in the trailer, but the cast list might
offer up some ideas, especially in the shape of
Jared Leto, fresh from his turn as the Joker in

Suicide Squad. Leto certainly has the chops to
pull off a portrayal as a rogue replicant, and
he’s not a million miles away from a young
Hauer in looks and style… we’re not looking
at Roy Batty V.2 here by any chance, are we..?
There have been rumours that the movie
will feature a CGI recreation of one or more of
the original replicant cast, a la Rogue One’s use
of characters from Star Wars: A New Hope.
Could this mean Batty? Or perhaps Rachael?
Maybe she’s still around, but hasn’t aged…
original actress Sean Young is now 57 and it’s
been widely reported that she says she was
not invited to reprise her role for the new
movie. Shame.
Also on the roster is Robin Wright, best
known for Netflix’s House Of Cards. Other
names linked to the movie include English
actor Lennie James, Barkhad Abdi, who
debuted in the Tom Hanks true-life thriller
Captain Phillips, Canadian Mackenzie Davis,
Hiam Abbass (who, point of note, is about the
same age, and as dark haired, as Sean
Young…), and Cuban actor Ana de Armas.
One interesting, but unconfirmed, rumour
was put about around a year ago when Dave
Bautista – Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy
– tweeted an enigmatic pic of himself holding
a tin-foil sculpture of a unicorn… which will
possibly mean different things to different
people, depending on which cut of the original
Blade Runner you’ve watched or prefer. Let’s
just hope it’s all worth the 35 year wait... CF
Blade Runner 2049 is in cinemas on 6 October.
THE 1980S | CLASSIC FILM
 1980s

Fatal
CLASSIC FILM | THE 1980S
 FATAL ATTRACTION

Adrian Lyne’s audacious

1987 sexual thriller broke
the mould, boiled the CLASSIC
bunny and prodded MOVIE
controversy. Thirty years
later, it’s still a movie that
won’t be ignored…

Attractio
WORDSJAMESMOTTRAM

S ome films are hits; others become a phenomenon. Take

Fatal Attraction. Adrian Lyne’s 1987 thriller about
a married man who sees a weekend dalliance turn into
the stuff of nightmares had audiences literally
screaming at the screen. Cries of, “Punch the bitch’s
face in. Kill her already. Kill the bitch!” rang out in
theatres across America. A male chorus, shocked by what they
saw, reacted with the only thing they had: vitriol. Only bested by
Three Men And A Baby at the US box-office that year, Fatal Attraction
didn’t just touch a nerve; it stuck a nine-inch kitchen knife in it.
Brian De Palma called it “a post-feminist AIDS thriller”. David
Mamet felt it was anti-women and fearful of sex. Oprah Winfrey
devoted a show to real-life fatal attractions. Time magazine
crafted a seven-page cover story, while countless other articles
applauded the film for inadvertently promoting monogamy and
quelling adultery. In the first week of its US release, seven out of
10 patients with marriage problems discussed the film during
sessions with a prominent Manhattan psychoanalyst.
Lyne, who sneaked into one public screening to record the
violent reactions, remembers the hysteria only too well. “I had
men ring me up and say, ‘Thanks a million, buddy. You’ve ruined
it for us.’” The British director already had enough enemies
without attracting further attention. A former commercials
director, Lyne’s Hollywood track record proved sex could sell.
He peddled female flesh in his 1983 dance-fantasy Flashdance
before following it with 9½ Weeks, in which Kim Basinger and
Mickey Rourke indulged in a sado-masochistic affair. Needless
to say, Lyne was not a favourite amongst feminists. Yet Fatal
Attraction was different; this was no softcore erotica, no proto-
Fifty Shades Of Grey. Rather, it was a story every adult could relate
to – married, divorced or single. After packing his wife Beth
(Anne Archer) and six-year-old daughter Ellen off to the country
for the weekend, lawyer Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas)
encounters single woman Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), a book
editor working for the New York publishers his firm represents.
They have a fling – one night spills into two. And then Alex
begins to unravel.
“It works because this has happened to everybody,”
commented Ned Tanen, then president of the film’s studio
backers Paramount Pictures. “Every woman has had the

THE 1980S | CLASSIC FILM

 CLASSIC MOVIE
Close up
There-shotfinalemayhave
lackedtheeeriegraceofthe
plannedMadameButterfly-
inspiredsuicide butLyneand
hiscastwentballs-outtocreate
aheart-poundingclimaxInamannerthat
Hitchcockwouldbeproudof it’samasterly
lessonintension-building asAlexconfronts
Bethinherbathroom“I’vealwaysthought
that withasequencelikethisthatinvolves
suspense ”saysLyne “ifyousplititupasmuch
asyoucanwithclose-upsitinstantlymakesthe
scenemoretactile”
Hebeginswithshotsoftapsbeingturned 
bathwatergushing aguninadrawerand
downstairsdoorsbeinglocked–allomensfor
themayhemtocomeThenthekillermoment
–borrowed admitsLyne fromthriller
CloselyWatchedTrains–asthecameradrifts
uptoseeBethwipeawaycondensationonthe
bathroommirror revealingAlex’sreflection
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theknifethatshehadpreviouslylungedat
Danwithinherownkitchen
“Glennwasanxiousnottobeaknife-
wieldinglunatic ”recallsLyne “sowetalked
aboutit andIsaidtoher ‘Whatifshe’sgotthe
knifedanglingbyherside ratherthanoverher
head?’”Whilethetwowomengrapple it’sonly
whenDanremovesthenoisykettlefromthe
stovetohearthechaosabovethatLynelets
thesceneexplodeDanthrottlesAlexinthe
bathbeforeBethshootsherdeadaftershe
rearsupfromthewateradeliberatenodtoLes

DiaboliquesInitiallyreluctant Closeeventually
cameroundtothiscatharticfinale“Itworked ”
shesays“Wegavetheaudiencemyblood”

guy she’s broken up with park across the street and stare at her
door. Every guy has had someone call at two in the morning and
Close
and
hang up.” Only Alex takes it to the extreme. She slices her wrists
Archer
shoot
as a desperate cry for help. She begins to call Dan’s house when
famous
ending
he refuses to take her calls at the office. Then the abuse really
starts… from throwing acid on the bonnet of his Volvo to
kidnapping Ellen for a rather symbolic rollercoaster ride.
As Village Voice critic J. Hoberman put it, “It’s a film stunned
by the power of love to make people disrupt their lives, lose
control, suffer delirium, forget who they are, leap into the
abyss.” Arriving when AIDS was causing society to turn its back
on promiscuous sex and to re-embrace the traditional nuclear
family, Alex Forrest became The Most Hated Woman In America,
as one publication dubbed her. It even coined the phrase “bunny
boiler” – soon to become common parlance for any unhinged
singleton – in reference to Alex’s most infamous moment, when
she cruelly kills Ellen’s pet rabbit.
Still, it’s rather strange to realise this infidelity thriller, with
its fashionable Manhattan locations and its Hollywood stars, has
British origins. Fatal Attraction began life as a 45-minute film,
Diversion, written and directed by James Dearden in 1979. An old
Etonian and the son of British director Basil Dearden, he was
battling writer’s block when, with his wife out of town, he was
struck by the thought, “What if I picked up that little black
address book and rang that girl who gave me her number at a
party six months ago?”
What resulted, says the writer, was “a moral tale about a
man who transgresses and pays the penalty”. Arriving before
such sexual thrillers as Body Heat (1981) and 1985’s Jagged Edge
BATHROOMBRAWL
(which also starred Close) turned up the heat in Hollywood, the Glenn
Fatal Attraction template was strongly etched from the start. Anne
Starring Cherie Lunghi and Stephen Moore as mistress and that
adulterer, events take place over a weekend as Lunghi’s
character ends up cutting her wrists (just as Alex does) and
placing telephone calls to her lover’s family home.
Winning the Gold Plaque for best short drama at the 1980
Chicago Film Festival, Dearden soon found himself – and his
film – courted by Sherry Lansing. The first woman ever to be
president of production at a major studio, Lansing had just
left 20th Century Fox having already proved herself in
Hollywood’s male-dominated world. No wonder Diversion
struck a chord. “What I liked… was that the man is made
responsible,” says Lansing. “There are consequences for him.
When I saw that short film, I was on the single woman’s
side.” Moreover, she immediately saw its universal appeal,
the way it held up a mirror. “The film is a Rorschach test for
everyone who sees it.”
Having teamed up with former president of Paramount,
Stanley Jaffe, to form a new production company, Lansing
invited Dearden to Los Angeles to expand Diversion into a feature.
But while she wanted the audience “to feel great empathy for
the [other] woman”, that was not the feeling in town. Paramount
President Michael Eisner “turned it down because he thought
the man was unsympathetic,” recalls Lyne. Only when Eisner
quit in 1984 did Lansing return to the studio with the project, this
time successfully.

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1980S

 ‘I had men ring
me up and say,
FATAL ATTRACTION
“Thanks a
million buddy.
You’ve ruined
it for us”’
Adrian Lyne



Femme fatale
Even so, Dearden was immediately made to put some of the
Alex’s
suicide
onus on the mistress, for fear of alienating the audience from
the film’s male lead. With each rewrite, the moral compass
Adrian
swung. The little black book belonging to the husband was
bloody
dispensed with, while the single woman became the initiator of
the affair. “She ended up having this kind of predatory quality,”
Dearden says. “It weakened her case and strengthened his.”
The dialogue was also peppered with clues of the carnage to
come – phrases like “If looks could kill” and “I love animals,
I’m a good cook”.
Fresh from playing his intrepid adventurer in Romancing The
Stone and its sequel, for Michael Douglas, Dearden’s script was
heaven-sent. For years, he’d wanted to make a movie about how
lust can destroy a married man’s life. He heard about Fatal
Attraction when he ran into Jaffe on a plane journey out of Los
Angeles. It wasn’t quite what he’d envisaged, but it was close
enough. “The plot is a reminder that while 99 times out of 100
you get away with cheating on your wife or income tax, there
may be one nasty time when you have to be responsible for
your actions.”
Lyne first remembers reading the story at his house in
France. “I knew it was a hell of a script right from the start,” he
says. Sitting on the stairs when he started to read it, he didn’t
move until he’d finished. “Of course, that was a good sign.” He
accepted, perhaps because he recognised elements of his own
life. Then on his second marriage, and with an 11-year-old
daughter, Lyne drew much of the film’s texture from this
family dynamic. Just little moments, like Ellen performing
her card tricks while her parents debate their move to the
CRYFORHELP
Top
attempt
suburbs, came from Lyne’s personal experience.
KNIFE-EDGE
While Lyne originally thought of casting Isabelle Adjani,
Above
Glenn Close was desperate to play Alex Forrest, to move away
Lyne gives
from the saintly image she’d cultivated in films like The World direction
According To Garp and The Natural. She told her agents she’d even
audition for the role – quite a comedown for a then three-time
Oscar nominee. Flying in from New York, she was a wreck, she
remembers: “I got so nervous I took a little bit of Valium.” It
didn’t help that Douglas was in the room, sitting behind a video
camera. Saying to herself “just let it all go wild”, she went for it.
“It was like lunacy unearthed,” says Lyne.
It’s a mood Close retained for her wild-eyed performance –
though she had doubts, particularly over the film’s most
notorious scene. “The bunny was the one thing I had a question
about. I took the script to a psychiatrist and said, ‘Is this
behaviour possible? Could somebody do something like that?’
The answer was yes.” Close ultimately consulted three clinical
psychoanalysts to try and get a fixed picture of Alex, though
her own life experience proved just as important. “I drew on
my own unhappy and vulnerable periods as a single career
woman,” she says. Ironically, at the time of the shoot, Close had
fallen in love with producer John Starke and – like Alex – had
fallen pregnant.
Rightly or wrongly, Alex came to define the 1980s single white
female; the woman who had put work before family. Lyne even

THE 1980S | CLASSIC FILM


spent time researching their surroundings – looking at dozens of
Polaroid shots of studio flats belonging to single women. “They
and
Douglas
were a little sad, if you want me to be honest,” he recalls. “They
the
floodgates
lacked soul.” Certainly his findings fed into Alex’s minimalist
psycho
thrillers
all-white loft space, and the work by production designer Mel
Bourne. Overlooking – aptly – a meat market, it’s in stark
right
contrast to the Gallagher’s cramped but homely apartment or
Adrian
the spacious suburban house they swap it for.
set
It was in Alex’s lair that Lyne managed to craft one of the
most memorable sex scenes of the decade. Not since Jack
Nicholson had taken Jessica Lange on the table in the remake of
The Postman Always Rings Twice had Hollywood seen such a good
use for a kitchen work surface – with Alex propped up on the
sink. Lyne tinged the scene with humour (Douglas tries to carry
her with his trousers round his ankles), just enough to diffuse
audience embarrassment. He does the same in the elevator
scene (with Dan almost caught by a passer-by as he receives
a blow job).
While Lyne claims his relationship with Close and Douglas
“was almost a ménage à trois”, he wasn’t the one performing on
camera. Close admits those scenes were exhilarating. “Michael
and I just plunged into them. It was almost a catharsis for me
– when we first started filming the sex scenes I thought I needed
a margarita every 10 minutes. But when it was over I remember
how odd it was to feel so positive about something I’d believed
was potentially disturbing.”
“Sex is not easy to do in movies, and everybody’s a judge,”
adds Douglas, who completed his so-called “sex trilogy” with
Basic Instinct and Disclosure. Curiously, while Fatal Attraction
became the dinner party conversation du jour in America, it was
met with a shrug in some parts of Europe. “They said, ‘In France,
everybody has a mistress. It’s not new information!’” laughs
CLASSIC FILM | THE 1980S
Douglas. “But it was a huge success in France – every wife took INFIDELITYAbove
their husband to the movies and sat him down there!” Close
While Lyne carefully calibrates Alex’s descent into hysteria, open
gradually building up her psychotic profile, it was all tailored for
towards a very brutal ending – one that suffered an equally brutal
OSCARNOMINEE
fate. In the days before DVDs gave us regular access to deleted
Above
scenes, the original conclusion to Fatal Attraction became one of Director
the most famous sequences never to make it to the screen. That Lyne on
is unless you were in one of the two test screenings that scored
the finale so poorly Lyne was forced to re-assemble his cast, at
the cost of $1.3m, and re-shoot a more traditional ending (see
the Close up box on page 68 for more).
Dark endings
In the axed scene, Beth, Dan and Ellen are in their garden,
sweeping up the autumn leaves, when they are visited by three
police officers. Dan is arrested, after discovering that Alex has
slit her own throat with the kitchen knife that, after her earlier
fight with him, is covered in Dan’s fingerprints. Lyne “adored”
it, he says. “It was totally horrifying. She’s got him from the
grave!” Well, not quite. That Beth then finds the cassette tape
Alex recorded, complete with her suicidal “I can’t live without
you” message, suggests his incarceration for her murder will
be shortlived.
Still, it was an ending that emphasised a more film noir
quality than the ultimately revised scene – and contains a quite
remarkable pay-off as Beth’s discovery of the tape is intercut
with shots of Alex sitting cross-legged on the floor, gracefully
dragging the blade across her throat to the sound of Puccini’s
Madame Butterfly (echoing the earlier scene where she listens to
 ‘When we started
FATAL ATTRACTION
filming the
sex scenes, I
remember how
odd it was to
feel so positive
about
something I’d
What
believed was
potentially
disturbing’
happened
Glenn
Close
next
Solitary man

 
Playing Dan Gallagher led to Douglas
becoming Hollywood’s go-to guy for
flawed alpha-males – tapping into
zeitgeist anxieties about marriage
TheWarOfTheRoses sexual
harassment Disclosure and the
workplace FallingDown In more
the opera alone, flicking her light switch on and off). Such was recent years he’s played the flamboyant pianist Liberace in
BehindTheCandelabra and appeared in Marvel’s Ant-Man
the impact of the so-called “suicide version”, it was even shown
in a handful of theatres in Tokyo because, according to one local
marketing manager, it had “a more Japanese flavour”.
Lyne became weary of the whole furore surrounding the
Close to the edge

 
Close continued to find her best roles
change. “The ending was always up for grabs and there were
as the pathologically driven female
never just two possibilities, there were four or five discussed.” from the scheming Marquise in

According to the director, the suicide was shot off-screen as well DangerousLiaisons to the dog-hating
Cruella De Vil in Disney’s live-action
as on, though no footage of the former ever saw the light of day. Dalmatians via ruthless legal
Did he feel Paramount made him go for a less graphic, more eagle Patty Hewes in TV show
commercially palatable ending? “It was a bitter pill at first,” he Damages 
’s gender-bending AlbertNobbs saw her
Oscar-nominated for a sixth time
admits, “because you fall in love with your footage, but [the
re-shot] ending is better dramatically.”
Not that Michael Anderson and Walter Seltzer thought so.
Respectively, the director and producer behind The Naked Edge,
In the Lyne of fire

 
Adrian Lyne delivered his masterpiece
a 1961 film that marked Gary Cooper’s last picture, were with LSD-’Nam horror Jacob’sLadder
dumbstruck when they saw Lyne’s revised, bloody conclusion. then went sex crazy Got Robert
“It’s a case of literal resemblance – shot by shot duplication,” Redford to make anIndecentProposal
to Demi Moore remade Lolita and
claimed Seltzer to the Los Angeles Times. Added Anderson, “It’s tackled infidelity again with 

’s
the same climax, even if they have a knife replacing a razor… I’m Unfaithful but never quite repeated
shocked by the similarities.” His response was to go to the the success of FatalAttraction 

Director’s Guild to ask them to look at both films; Lyne claims

he’d never even heard of Anderson’s movie.
Six months after its US release, by which point the film was
Violent femmes

 
Alex Forrest wasn’t the only screen
closing in on a $320m global box office, Fatal Attraction was
siren to start wailing as Hollywood
nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture for Jaffe and woke up to the fact that audiences
Lansing, Best Director for Lyne and Best Screenplay for Dearden. had a thirst for dangerous women
Sharon Stone’s psychotic author in
Close and Archer were both up for Best Actress/Supporting
BasicInstinct– tormenting poor
Actress, respectively. But the film came away with nothing – old Michael Douglas again – was
beaten in all its categories by either Moonstruck or The Last followed by Jennifer Jason Leigh’s loopy flatmate in
Single WhiteFemale and Rebecca De Mornay’s nutty
Emperor. Arguably, the conflicting opinions the film threw up
nanny in TheHandThatRocksTheCradle
divided Academy voters as much as the public and the press. In
Lyne’s eyes, the film was never intended as anti-feminist nor did
it set out to advocate marriage or family values (despite the final
shot of the Gallagher group photo). “I didn’t mean any sort of
Yuppies in peril

 
FatalAttraction was in the vanguard
moral stance at all,” he argues. But what it did do was provoke of home-invasion thrillers where
debate, from workplace watercoolers to op-ed columns, young upwardly mobile types came
under attack Films like Something
tapping into what Time magazine called “the current mood Wild UnlawfulEntry and Pacific
of sexual malaise”. One thing’s certain though: it’s a Heightsall had audiences double-
classic cautionary tale. “It’s saying you do have a locking their doors at night David
A L L S TA R , R E X

Fincher’s PanicRoomrevived the trend briefly though trust

responsibility for your actions,” says Lansing, “because Michael Haneke to top them all with FunnyGames
they have consequences.” And they can be fatal. CF

THE 1980S | CLASSIC FILM

 1980s
JOHN
CARPENTER
HE’S MADE SOME OF THE GREATEST HORROR
MOVIES OF ALL TIME. WE ASKED HIM ABOUT
THE HIGHS – AND LOWS – OF HIS CAREER…
ollywood. The
H
sign on John
Carpenter’s gate
reads “Beware the
occupant”, but
you’d never guess

that one of America’s premiere architects
of nightmare movies resides in the
clapperboard house behind the white
picket fence on this leafy suburban street.
Well, not unless you’ve just watched
Halloween and have Haddonfield, Illinois
on the brain…
Carpenter is in his study. He stands
stock still in the centre of the room,
waiting, then stretches out one hand to
shake and flaps the other in the direction
of a cheese plate. “I got you something to
eat,” he says, voice scratchy from a
lifetime of smoking. Now in his sixties,
hair snowy white, he retreats behind a
giant oak desk and sparks up a Winston.
Making movies is in Carpenter’s blood.
He started when he was eight, relieving
the tedium of growing up in Bowling
Green, Kentucky by wielding an 8mm
camera. Ten years on he attended USC
film school in Los Angeles, fashioning
award-winning shorts before dropping
out in ’71 with one grade to go. And with
good reason: he spent the next three
years turning 45-minute student film
Dark Star – a spaced-out space movie –
into a tidy feature.
There followed accepted classics (now,
at least) Assault On Precinct 13 (1976),
Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), Escape
From New York (1981) and The Thing (1982),
and a run of also-good-yet-bizarrely
REX
CLASSIC FILM | THE 1980S
WOR DS JAMIE GR AHAM
underrated movies that took him up to
the mid-’90s: Christine (1983), Starman
(1984), Big Trouble In Little China (1986),
Prince Of Darkness (1987), They Live (1988)
and In The Mouth Of Madness (1995).
Carpenter completists will also know that
Someone’s Watching Me! (1978) and Elvis
(1979) are superior TV movies, again
showcasing the director’s economical
storytelling skills, technical craft and gift
for working with actors.
With a CV this good, is it any wonder
that some lame later work can’t taint the
belief the real John Carpenter will one day
return? There were flashes of him in
Vampires (1998) and his two Masters Of
Horror TV episodes, “Cigarette Burns” and
“Pro-Life” (2005-2006). We chatted to
him shortly before The Ward was released
in 2010, his first feature in nearly a
decade. So let’s start there…
How did it feel to go back to movies?
Fabulous. However, there are minuses.
Pluses and minuses. I love cinema. I
love the process of shooting it. It’s been
my first love since I was a little kid. But
for an old guy like me, there’s a lot of
stress involved.
Is your obsession with cinema still
alive and well?
It burns on and off. I had to stop for a few
years because I just lost interest. [Making
movies] requires an amount of ambition
and stress. I certainly had it when I was
young, less so now. My drive when I was
young was to become a professional and
I became one. So what am I gonna do?
You’re a classical filmmaker, a
storyteller. Are there many of those
in modern Hollywood?
It’s all shooters. They come from
commercials and videos, that background.
They’re used to pleasing a lot of people,
which is a real trick. That’s an art form in
itself. I never mastered that; I’ve always
gone for myself and an imaginary audience,
as opposed to pleasing producers. But a lot
of directing these days is technological. I
was with one of my actor friends and asked
him, “How’s it going?” He said the director
said, “Do what you want, it’s up to you.”
You’ve never got the credit you deserve
for your work with actors…
Well, anytime anybody wants to praise me
for any reason I accept it. Listen, I’m very
happy with the performances, it’s been
great. I’ve had some real luck with the
people I’ve cast.
It’s not just cinema that’s changed.
Audiences have too. Younger viewers
find Halloween “slow”…
That generation’s been raised on a lot of
electronics; if you play videogames you
can assimilate visual information real fast.
So somebody from my generation… That’s
not the way we tell stories. That’s what
they mean by slow. I don’t blame them.
It is too slow.
In your heyday you refused to analyse
the body of work you were creating.
Can you now look back and identify
a through line?
Not in every film, but many films are

 1980
CLASSIC sDIRECTOR
about humans in claustrophobic situations,
humans trapped in various ways. Life is
hard and then you die. I don’t know. I think
it’s a cruel universe, but the salvation comes
from within.
Where does that fear of entrapment
come from?
Probably my past; probably when I was
young that was the way I felt, whether it was
true or not. I had a really interesting
upbringing. I had a lot of freedom, but
emotionally I felt trapped.
Moving from New York to Bowling Green,
Kentucky must have been part of it…
That’s it, that’s right. There were other
elements that I don’t wanna talk about.
Family issues that I felt kind of trapped in,
a little lost.
The fear of losing control is also a
constant in your films and in your career.
You’ve made tight, economical movies to
stop the suits interfering.
Well, the suits have an important job;
there’s nothing wrong with their job. But
the thing is, sometimes I’ve collaborated
with people and sometimes I’ve pushed
them back. I was told in film school that if

you wanna make it your film, you have to try
to maintain control. And that’s true. On the
other hand, because nothing is black and
white, you have to be willing to hear things
that make you mad and say, “Yeah that’s
true, let me reflect on that…”
Let’s zoom in on your movies. You’ve
said before that there are two types of
horror story: the horror within and the
horror without. Is it fair to say that you’ve
often tried to do both at the same time?
The easier one to tell is “the other”, the
outsider. When I was little, I grew up
watching invasion movies about monsters
from outer space. I loved those movies, I still
love those movies. But “the other” is
standard. The evil inside is harder to do.
Your version of The Thing is horror from
the outside, but there’s also inner terror,
paranoia…
AT
WORK impress you more than anything. They go
I totally agree with that. That’s the whole
Masters into your heart and they stay there and you
point of the movie.
It’s arguably your masterpiece and yet it
flopped, commercially and critically.
All the science-fiction and horror fans
turned against it. That was the part that was
so astonishing. I don’t know – maybe I
fucked the corpse of a classic [The Thing From
Another World, 1951], I guess that’s what they
thought. I never lost faith in the movie. I
think it’s terrific. But now I can understand
why audiences didn’t go for it. It’s the
CLASSIC FILM | THE 1980S
uncertain and downbeat ending. People hate
uncertainty. Even if it’s a bad ending, or a
sad ending, and it’s certain, they’ll accept it.
Rob Bottin’s special effects were
slammed for showing too much. Of
course, looking back now…
They look quaint, don’t they?
In places, but they’re a benchmark for
practical effects. Were people pissed off
because you relied on suggestion for
Halloween and were now letting it all
hang out?
Exactly. There’s an unwritten law in
Hollywood that I think, maybe, comes
maybe from The Bad And The Beautiful, when
Kirk Douglas and Barry Sullivan as the
director and producer go into the special
effects department. The guys are showing
them the cat outfits and they look awful,
and Kirk Douglas says, “Let’s do it the
old-fashioned way, put it in shadows.”
Which is great, but if you have something
that you can bring out under the light and
you think it’s something people haven’t
seen before, then do it, go for it, show it.
If The Thing had been a hit, do you think
your career would have gone the way of
De Palma, Raimi and Spielberg?
I don’t know about the exact trajectory, but
my career would have been different. Right
after that I went out and made some
big-budget movies and some were very
successful, but it was just never quite the
same. And at one point in the ’80s I had a
bad experience with a studio head.
Can you say?
Barry Diller. He’s a very famous guy, very
successful. I knew him as “Killer Diller”. I
just had a bad experience with him.
On Big Trouble In Little China?
We shot the script and the script was really
nutty. It kind of embraced the cool part and
the foolishness of kung-fu and Asian
movies. And the studio [Fox] and Diller saw
it and this was not what they expected. They
MAN
Directing
OfHorror
WHEN YOU’RE YOUNG
AND YOU HAVE YOUR
CAREER AHEAD OF
YOU, EVERYTHING
IS WIDE OPEN
wanted Indiana Jones. So they tried to get me
to take out everything humorous. I took out
a couple of things and showed it and they
came back and said, “Can you put all that
stuff back in?” And I thought, “That’s
enough, why am I doing this?”
Did they take the movie away from you?
It was more the way I was treated. I just
thought I was treated like a piece of shit
without any experience whatsoever. And
they don’t treat me that way. I’m a person.
OK, if I don’t give them what they want
they have a right to kick my ass, but jeez,
be nice about it. But I’ve come back and
made studio films since then and had some
good experiences.
Talking of being treated like shit, after
The Thing flopped you were kicked off
Firestarter…
A fabulous screenplay. But they [Universal]
abandoned what we had. It was too
expensive and ambitious. They just wanted
low-budget horror. But I got paid for it,
which was nice. I got fired and paid, so
I couldn’t cry too heavily. [Laughs]
You moved on to another Stephen King
adaptation, Christine. It’s not a film you’re
massively proud of…
No, no, I’m proud of it, it’s just not my
favourite.I think it’s got some good stuff in it.
I love Christine.
You’re a good man.
I was 14 when it came out on VHS and
I watched it again and again.
See, here’s my theory. The movies you see
when you’re young never leave you and they
cannot get them out. I know exactly what
you’re talking about. The movies for me are
from the ’50s; I will always love them, I will
always go “Wow”, and other people will look
at me like, “What is this piece of shit?”
Christine isn’t scary. But it works as a love
story, a study of teenage alienation and
an ode to friendship.
That’s true, you got it. That’s the part I went
for. I thought, “I can’t make this really
scary, so let’s do relationships.”

QUEENS
on
the
set
of
with
Adrienne
Jamie
Lee
and
Psycho’s
Leigh
It’s got one of your best scores. Did you
ever think your keyboard proddings
would be so treasured?
No. Those scores were functional. They were
cheap to do and they provided support for
the scenes and occasionally came up with
a theme that you can play in a film and it can
be associated with it.
Halloween is your most famous score and
your most famous movie…
Now, younger people think Halloween is
a Rob Zombie movie.
What do you think of the Zombie remake?
Rob is a friend of mine and I’ve got no
comment on that.
With the original Halloween, did you set
out to make the ultimate suspense film?
I wish I could say I did but no, no, no. I just
wanted to work. This was an assignment
that came to call and I got some money to
make a low-budget horror exploitation
movie. It was designed to have some scare
scenes. And the distributor didn’t think it
was that scary.
Did you think you had something special
when you locked the movie?
No. It worked, it worked fine. But I was not
involved very closely in the editing. I don’t
remember what happened. I was not in the
editing room. When I came back one of my
best friends had cut it. And I watched it, it
was fine. The guy’s done a real good job.
You didn’t oversee the cut?
REX
Not on that one. That one cut together
easily. I think it was the simplicity of the
story that worked. It turns out all you’re
doing is laying out one scene after another
with normalcy.
Halloween launched the slasher cycle but
it built on Psycho, Black Christmas and
Italian giallo…
Black Christmas was something I had seen.
I thought, “Well, that’s how not to do it.” I
love Dario Argento. Not influences, I don’t
do that. The modern horror film was born
with Psycho. It influenced everything. I was
just following along in that tradition. I didn’t
think I’d broken new ground. There was a lot
of stuff that happened earlier, not just Black
Christmas. Teenage movies were made in the
’50s, you know – teenagers in their hot rods
with a giant spider.
We touched on Rob Zombie’s Halloween.
What do you think of the other remakes
of your work?
I kind of enjoyed them. Assault was pretty
good: the casting was great, the situation
was good, great killing in the snow. Now
they just finished shooting The Thing.
That’s not really a remake, that’s a story of
the Norwegian camp. What happened there.
That’s not really mine. They’re gonna do
Escape From New York. I have no idea what
they’re going to do with it.
What do you think of the state of modern
horror movies?
Some of them are pretty damn good. That
remake of Dawn Of The Dead was pretty good.
I liked it. I saw Let The Right One In. It was OK,
sort of character-based, interesting.
SCREAM
Carpenter
TheFog
Barbeau
Curtis
Janet
You hated The Blair Witch Project, didn’t you?
That’s a movie without a director. I couldn’t
believe it. I thought that the actors did fine
but there was no point of view. “What is this

shit? You turn your back on the stairwell?”
Jeez. Some of my godson’s friends thought it
was real. I couldn’t believe it.
Did you feel you were working in a golden
age of horror, back in the ’70s and ’80s?
It was unbelievable. A lot of talented
directors, in different ways. I was an admirer
of [David] Cronenberg. Tobe Hooper’s work
on Chain Saw was unbelievable. But I think
there’s been many golden ages. There was
one with science fiction in the ’50s. All sorts
of crazy shit.
Looking back at your career, are there any
movies you feel were overlooked?
There’s this string of films that I made in the
’80s and early ’90s that I’m really happy
with. Some of the low-budget stuff: Prince Of
Darkness, Mouth Of Madness. I’m really happy
with them.
Any regrets? Do you wish you’d got to
make more comedies and dramas?
When you’re young and you have your career
ahead of you, everything is wide open. All
you can do is imagine the possibilities. Once
things begin to take shape and become real,
a lot of projects you become involved with
don’t work and don’t happen. Your attitude
changes. If my career had gone a little
differently, I might have gotten other choices,
but it doesn’t mean I would have taken them
or that I would have done a good job. Listen,
I got to be John Carpenter. And I enjoy it. CF
THE 1980S | CLASSIC FILM
 1980s

CLASSIC
MOVIE
Ful l
me ta l
jac ke t
CLASSIC FILM | THE 1980S
 FULL METAL JACKET
WORDSJAMESMOTTRAM

Tough, hard
and dark,
Kubrick’s
Vietnam
classic is as
devastating
as the ammo
it’s named
after. Get
ready to
revisit,
maggots! 

1987 was a good year for Vietnam. Twelve years

after the fall of Saigon, the cycle of films
dealing with one of the most unpopular wars
in US history was in full swing. While Oliver
Stone’s grunts’-eye-view, Platoon, won four
Oscars including Best Picture, Hamburger Hill,
The Hanoi Hilton, Gardens Of Stone and Good
Morning, Vietnam were all released. But one
stood apart, if for no other reason than it was
the 12th film in the legendary career of Stanley
Kubrick. Full Metal Jacket was a Vietnam movie
like no other.
If it felt like Kubrick arrived late to the
party, it was only because he spent a long time
getting ready. Shortly before the May 1980
release of his previous film, The Shining, he’d
contacted Michael Herr. The foreign
correspondent for Esquire during the Vietnam
War, Herr published Dispatches, a highly
celebrated account of his experiences in
Indochina in 1977. Moreover, he’d written
Martin Sheen’s hypnotic voiceover in

’NAM GANG Clockwise from top left Gunnery Sgt

Hartman R Lee Ermey drills Privates Pyle Vincent
D’Onofrio and Joker Matthew Modine explosions
in Cliffe marshes doubling for Vietnamese countryside
Joker is snapped with a Vietnamese prostitute Stanley
Kubrick behind the lens Eightball Dorian Harewood
sustains a sniper hit Animal Mother Adam Baldwin
fires back Kubrick on set in Newnham east London

THE 1980S | CLASSIC FILM

 CLASSIC MOVIE
Apocalypse Now. So began what Herr dubbed college for the phony tough and the crazy
“one phone call lasting three years, with brave”. Led by the God-fearing drill instructor
interruptions”, as Kubrick told him he Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, they are brutalised,
was looking for a war story to tell. dehumanised and in the case of “disgusting
It wasn’t until two years later that Kubrick fatbody” Private Pyle, tormented to the point
that came across Gustav Hasford’s 1979 novella of mental meltdown.
The Short-Timers, in the magazine Kirkus Rarely has a film’s opening third ever been
Reviews. He read it, and then reread it almost as intense or inch-perfect – even if Kubrick
immediately, calling it “a unique, absolutely was forced to age-up his recruits. “We tried
wonderful book”. Herr concurred, believing it very hard to have 19-year-olds in the boot
a masterpiece. Hasford, a former Marine and camp,” admits Harlan. “We had over 2,000
military correspondent who served in Vietnam casting tapes from the Midwest region, from
at the height of the war, was working as a Chicago to Peoria, Illinois. But we couldn’t find
security guard and living in his car when a seven actors. We could find one, maybe two,
Munich businessman with no apparent ties to but we needed seven. It requires a maturity
the film industry approached him for the that normal boys of 18, 19 simply don’t have.
rights. Only later did he learn it was for So, out of utter frustration, Stanley moved up
Stanley Kubrick. to the age [bracket] of 25.”
While he later needed lawyers to ensure his Enter Matthew Modine, who’d played
co-screenwriting credit, Hasford was invited to Vietnam recruits in Robert Altman’s Streamers
work on the script with Herr and Kubrick, who and Alan Parker’s Birdy. He first heard about
had fallen hard for The Short-Timers. “The topic
of war had fascinated him all his life,” says Jan
Harlan, Kubrick’s brother-in-law and executive
producer. “He was always interested in this
phenomenon, this competitiveness, this
strange human quality of having to battle
things out.”

By the time Kubrick saw studio MGM pull
the plug on his meticulously planned biopic
of Napoleon in 1970, America was mired in
the jungle warfare of Vietnam. Kubrick was
both fascinated and repulsed, in particular
by the propaganda perpetuated by the US
government. “Vietnam was such a phony war,”
he later told Evening Standard critic Alexander
Walker, “in terms of the technocrats fine-
tuning the facts like an ad agency, talking of
‘kill ratios’ and ‘hamlet pacification’ and
inciting the men to falsify a ‘body count’ or
at least total up the ‘blood trails’ on the
assumption they’d lead to bodies anyhow.”
With The Short-Timers, Kubrick found a story
that dealt with these themes via the pivotal
Private Joker, and his increasing
disillusionment as a combat correspondent
for Stars And Stripes magazine. “Search and
destroy”, Joker learns, will be renamed “sweep
and clear”, while his superior officer instructs
him to “rewrite” his news story “and give it a
JEERS & TEARS
happy ending”. Yet Harlan, for one, sees FMJ Pyle Vincent
differently. “It isn’t about the Vietnam War. D’Onofrio gets
It’s [about] the attitude of the people in power a dressing-down
towards young people. It’s a story about the from Gunnery Sgt
brainwashing of young people.” Hartman R Lee
Ermey as Joker
Matthew Modine
PRIVATE CHANCERS
FMJ begins with an unforgettable 43-minute
looks on Kubrick
on set now a war
correspondent
sequence set in Marine Corps training camp Joker joins the
Parris Island, South Carolina, where Joker Lusthog Squad
(we never know his real name) and his fellow during the
recruits endure what he calls “an eight-week Battle of Hue

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1980S

 FULL METAL JACKET

CLOSE UP
ThefinalsceneonParrisIsland whenPyle
blowsawayHartmaninthelatrinebefore
turningthegunonhimself remainsFullMetal
Jacket’sstand-outmomentButfortheshotof
Pyle’sbrainssplatteringthewhitewallbehind
him theFXteamstruggledtofindaconvincing
techniquetomakeitworkWillingvolunteers
werepaidatimetotestexplosivesquibs 
tapedtothebacksoftheirheadswithjusta
metalplateforprotection buttheresultswere
bothdisappointinganddangerous
ThenMatthewModinecametothe
rescue“ItoldKubrickaboutanotherfilmI
hadseenwitha‘headhit’fromashotgunblast
his role as Joker when Val Kilmer – who he’d
never met before – mouthed obscenities at him
at a Sunset Boulevard restaurant. Kilmer was
distraught that Kubrick wanted Modine – news
to both the young actor, who hadn’t even sent
in an audition tape, and his manager. But it
was true. Kubrick had been sent footage by
Parker from Birdy – though ironically the scene
ftlongPVCpipe usinghighly
(“Just two actors demonstrating that they could
scream,” Kubrick said) didn’t tell him
anything. It was a quiet moment at the end
that got Modine the job.
A few weeks later, Modine received a script,
with a yellow cover depicting silhouettes of
three Marines jumping from a Huey chopper.
The title had been changed from The Short-
Timers after Kubrick saw the phrase “full
metal jacket” (meaning a lead bullet encased
‘THE TOPIC
OF WAR HAD
FASCINATED
KUBRICK
ALL HIS LIFE’
JAN HARLAN
in copper) in a gun catalogue. “It was unlike
any script I had seen before,” remembers
Modine. “It was more like a ‘treatment’ for
a script. It was more open and fluid which
invited the reader to imagine what might be
happening rather than being told through
detailed descriptions.”
Once on board, it was Modine that
suggested Vincent D’Onofrio play the vacant
role of Pyle; the two knew each other from
acting class. “I’d been working at the front
door of the Hard Rock Café as a bouncer, and
Matthew and his wife walked by,” remembers
D’Onofrio. “I said, ‘Hey man, where you been?’
He said he’s doing this Kubrick thing, and
there was a part available.” D’Onofrio put
himself on tape, wearing army fatigues,
reciting a monologue written for a rookie cop
(deleting all references to the police).
Modine, whose relationship with D’Onofrio
fractured over the shoot (“I do want to kick his
ass for being such a fucking dickhead,” he
wrote in his diary), had no doubt about his
abilities. “That was why I recommended Vince
to Stanley. Because I knew Vince could pull it
off. I would have never recommended an actor
to Stanley if I didn’t have faith that the actor
had the chops. You can open a door for
someone, but the person that walks into the
room has to deliver the goods. Vince delivered.”
Gaining 70lbs for the role, such was the strain
on his body that D’Onofrio badly damaged his
knee filming on the assault course.
A third voice resonates through that
opening – R. Lee Ermey. A former Marine
Corps drill instructor, he was working in a
totheface”ItwasWilliamFriedkin’s
thrillerToLiveAndDieInLA“Stanleywas
quiteimpressed ”remembersModine fondly
Kubrickobtainedaprint theninvitedModine

intoamakeshifteditingsuitetowatchthescene
inquestion sloweddownandwithnosound
Ratherthanuseasquib theyrealisedit
wasanFXsupervisor“withacatapultflinging
gutsintothispooractor’sface”recallsModine
Friedkinthensnippedoutseveralframesso
viewerswouldbeunabletotellthisbroadside
wasdeliveredoffcameraKubrickwentone
bettera
pressurisedairtopropelamixofpastaand
fakebloodontothewallTravellingat
incrediblespeed onlyone‘tell-tale’frame
had toberemoved“I’mveryimpressedwith
whatwe andtheeffectsteam finallyarrived
at ”saysModine
factory when Harlan contacted him to join FMJ
as a technical advisor (a job he’d done on
Apocalypse Now). When Kubrick discovered his
electric clippers for shaving the recruits’ hair
didn’t achieve the desired effect for the
opening sequence, it was Ermey who called a
Marine Corps buddy to learn they actually use
clippers meant for shearing French poodles.
Soon enough, Kubrick suggested Ermey
audition the 40 boot-camp extras (many from
the British Territorial Army), who would line
up alongside Modine, D’Onofrio and co-stars
Arliss Howard (Pvt. Cowboy) and Peter Edmund
(Pvt. Snowball). “Then something happened,”
says Harlan. “He went to wardrobe. He got
himself a uniform and fell back into his old
role, shouting at them. They didn’t know what
was happening; they laughed their heads off at
this lunatic. But they wanted the job so they
took it on the chin. He treated them as he
THE 1980S | CLASSIC FILM
 CLASSIC MOVIE
would’ve treated real boot-camp people. And,
of course, he had the right to fire them. He had
the real authority.”
Ermey was not only auditioning others;
he was making a play for the role of Hartman,
earmarked for actor Tim Colceri. Knowing full
well these videotaped sessions would be viewed
by Kubrick, “I worked it out where Stanley had
to watch me be his drill instructor, whether he
liked it or not,” says Ermey, whose inventive
invective left Kubrick shocked and delighted.
“He had this unbelievable, endless resource for
spouting obscenities,” laughs Harlan. “Our
script wasn’t exactly a Disney movie either. But
goodness me, it was nothing like this.”
Kubrick eventually compiled a 250-page
transcript of Ermey’s juicy insults (“You’re so
ugly, you could be a modern-art masterpiece”),
re-working these nuggets into the script. There
was little choice but to give Ermey the role of
Hartman (Colceri was consoled with
a memorable cameo as the helicopter
doorgunner who shoots women and children).



Gas Works on the Isle of Dogs (already used in

The only problem was, without training as an
actor, Ermey couldn’t remember his rapid-fire,
stream-of-consciousness thoughts. So
Kubrick’s assistant Leon Vitale drilled him,
firing tennis balls and oranges at him in a room
while getting him to say his lines.
“Lee worked his ass off to memorise his
lines and was a real pro,” says Modine. “He
should have won a ton of awards for his
performance.” His sole nomination was a
Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor. But at
least he could be consoled that he became the
first (and last) actor in a Kubrick film to enjoy a
spin-off hit single, the song “Full Metal Jacket
(I Wanna Be Your Drill Instructor)” reaching
teeth, coffee breath, cigarettes, nervous tension
and – after weeks of yelling – blood.”
PRIVATE CHANCERS
Remarkably, aside from second-unit footage of
a helicopter flying over palm trees shot in
Australia, FMJ was entirely shot in England, all
filmed within a 20-mile radius of Kubrick’s
St. Albans estate. “There was never any
thought in his mind about not sleeping in his
own bed,” laughs Harlan. The boot-camp
barracks were built on an industrial estate in
Enfield. Parris Island was recreated on a British
Territorial Army base in Bassingbourn. And
1984 and the opening of For Your Eyes Only).
Located on the north bank of the Thames,
this square-mile was already scheduled for
demolition, making it perfect for the bombed-
out Imperial City of Hue, which dominates the
film’s latter stages as Joker accompanies
Cowboy’s platoon on a mission that goes
disastrously wrong. Buoyed by the coincidence
that many of Beckton’s buildings had been
designed by a French architect who also worked
in Hue, production designer Anton Furst sent
his research team to the US Library of Congress
to find Vietnamese magazines. Adverts found
within were then microfilmed, blown up into
signs and posters and used as authentic décor.
To complete the look, palm trees were flown
in from Valencia (fire engines were used to
water them and keep them alive). Then the
fun started. A demolition team dynamited
buildings, while Furst worked for six weeks
with a wrecking ball specialist to create ruins.
“No amount of money would have allowed you
to build [those],” noted Kubrick, a general in
charge of his very own war zone. “Because of
the isolated geography of the place, we were
able to light huge fires and create giant pillars
of smoke.” A tank filled with 3,000 gallons of
burning gas was used to set the buildings
ablaze in the final scene.
A L L S TA R , R E X

No.2 in the British charts. So what was it like most famously, the Tet Offensive combat Meanwhile, Harlan tracked down the
being drilled by Ermey? Modine smiles. “Bad scenes were staged in east London, at Beckton right hardware. “The tanks were the best deal

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1980S

 FULL METAL JACKET
when his military-like planning deserted him.
“I saw Stanley Kubrick walk around the set and
not know what to do and send everybody home,
WHAT
y’know?” recalls D’Onofrio. There were
particularly lengthy discussions about the
ending, which follows the brutal scene where
HAPPENED
Eightball (Dorian Harewood) is shot by a female
Vietnamese sniper and used as bait to draw out
the platoon. “He brought us into his motor-
NEXT…
home,” remembers Harewood, “and he
STANLEY’S SWANSONG
Kubrick flirted with Louis
said,‘You know, I’m not sure how I want to Begley’s WW novel Wartime
end this film. You guys have any ideas?’” Lies developed AI then
The original ending had Joker shot dead settled on erotic odyssey Eyes
in Hue, intercut with clips of him as a boy. But WideShut with Tom Cruise
and Nicole Kidman Completed just before
rather like the scene where Animal Mother
his death Kubrick thought it was “the
decapitates the sniper (it was shot but deemed greatest contribution he made to the art
too violent), it was rejected. Dozens of ideas of filmmaking” says Harlan
were tossed around, until Kubrick hit on the
soldiers marching through the streets singing ’NAM IT
the Mickey Mouse Club song. Led by Joker, his The Vietnam movie cycle
continued led by an Oliver
Jungian “duality” expressed by a peace button
Stone nursing a hard-on for
’Nam BornontheFourthof

INTHELINEOFFIRE ‘IT WAS July HeavenAndEarth

Grunts either gang-raped CasualtiesOf
War or dropped rage-inducing LSD

UNLIKE
Main Animal Mother Jacob’s Ladder Then came Desert Storm
Adam Baldwin and Joker the first Gulf War and a whole new battle
Matthew Modine take cover for Hollywood to fight
left Cowboy Arliss Howard is
killed by a teenage sniper
ANY SCRIPT HE’S GOT CHARACTER
After FullMetalJacket
D’Onofrio evolved into a


I ever made,” he grins. “Stanley wanted these

particular tanks, totally outdated military
I’D SEEN sought-after character actor
Oliver Stone Tim Burton and
Robert Altman all got in the
queue Peddled a neat-line in villains
equipment from the Vietnam War. And the
Americans wouldn’t talk to us – since BEFORE’ The Cell’s serial killer TheSaltonSea’s
meth-head dealer before going straight-ish

MATTHEW
on Law&OrderCriminalIntent
=k'yLmkZg`^eho^, we had burned all bridges.” In
the end, he found three M14 tanks at a military
depot in Antwerp, convincing the Belgian army
THE GOSPEL

MODINE
to let them borrow them for free. Transporting ACCORDING
them at night via low-loaders, the only TO MATTHEW
problem was upon arrival in London. “The From MarriedToTheMob to
Dartford Tunnel authority has a specific rule MemphisBelle Modine
continued his cultured career
that no heavy weapons can be transported on his lapel and “Born to Kill” on his helmet,
– at least until he played a
through the tunnel.” here were trained killers – barely older than thief in Renny Harlin’s 
Harlan eventually persuaded the authorities children and still sounding like them. “Stanley pirate flop CutthroatIsland Like D’Onofrio
to relent in time for the start of the shoot, on always knew he wanted to show this his 

s were quieter but that was

before Christopher Nolan cast him in
August 27, 1985. It wouldn’t wrap until ambiguity,” says Harlan.
The DarkKnightRises…
September the following year, delayed in part On release in June 1987, reviews were
because production was shut down for five positive (“A film of immense and very rare
months when Ermey cracked his ribs in a car imagination,” said The New York Times) and so
GENERAL LEE
Ermey continued to wheel out
accident. But mainly it was Kubrick, drilling was the public (made for $17m, it grossed his drill-instructor persona in
his actors over and over. Ermey’s voice barely $46.3m in the US alone). Kubrick and his films check TheFrighteners
stood up to the strain of going full-tilt (the co-writers were nominated for a Best Adapted commercials everything from
motorcycles to pistachio nuts
scene where he discovers a doughnut in Pyle’s Screenplay Oscar (losing out to The Last
and on his own website where you can buy
foot locker took over 30 takes). The sequence Emperor). But it’s in the intervening quarter- everything from motivational dolls and mugs
where Joker, Cowboy and fellow grunt Animal century that the film’s reputation has grown. to ringtones and answer phone messages
Mother (Adam Baldwin) let rip with their guns “It doesn’t feel like 25 years ago,” mused Now drop and give me 
 maggot!
by a wall took a month to shoot – because the Modine in 2012. “Probably because America
bullet hits had to be reset every time. continues to involve itself in similar situations.
It was shot by his former focus puller Douglas Afghanistan, for instance. We continue to
Milsome, scored by his daughter Vivian (under make similar mistakes.” Like The Rolling
the name “Abigail Mead”); Kubrick surrounded Stones sing on the end credits, Kubrick really
himself with “family”. Yet there were times did paint it black. CF

THE 1980S | CLASSIC FILM



CLASSIC FILM | THE 1990S

 1990s 

FROM INDIE SUCCESS STORIES TO

SUPERSTAR ACTORS, VIA THE BIRTH
OF TRULY DIGITAL FILMMAKING…
WORDSSTEVEO’BRIEN

THE 1990S | CLASSIC FILM

 CLASSIC DECADE


I
f the 1970s was a golden era in American cinema and the
1980s a rather brash change in direction, what was the
1990s? It’s true that the tentpole blockbuster ballooned in
conspicuity, but it was also a time where independent cinema
blossomed with fresh young voices emerging from the
fringes of Generation X. Cinema attendance went up during
the decade too as new technologies revolutionised the film
viewing experience. With the arrival of digital, things would
never be the same again.
Though digital technology came of age in the 1990s,
computer-generated effects had been around since the early
1980s. The Genesis Experiment sequence in Star Trek II: The
Wrath Of Khan was 64 seconds of cutting-edge visuals, while
Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) had thrown up the first
photo-realistic digital “character” when a stained glass
knight came alive to do battle with a petrified vicar. But it
wasn’t until the 1990s that the technology had ripened so
much that movies previously thought of as unmakeable were
suddenly, thrillingly, possible. CGI effects were previously a
1
simple garnish, but now they were suddenly the spine of the
picture. James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
was talked about as much for its innovative morphing effects
as it was for any individual performance, while 1993’s Jurassic
Park would, in an age before CGI, surely have been made with
stop-motion models. And as great as David Koepp’s
screenplay was, would it have worked with Ray Harryhausen-
style effects? It was the eye-wowingly photo-realistic
authenticity of Steven Spielberg’s $63 million crowd-pleaser
that helped it become the biggest grossing movie of the year.

2 4

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1990S

 1990s

T2 and Jurassic Park confidently announced to the rest of

Hollywood that, within reason, anything was now possible
visually. Want a movie where two black-suited figures track
down rogue aliens? No problem. Fancy seeing Tom Hanks
meeting President Kennedy? Sure, we can rustle that up.
Recreate the Titanic? You betcha.
The rise of the blockbuster meant that, while the average
film budget towards the end of the decade was $53 million,
increasingly numbers of movies were spilling over the $100
million mark. And increasingly during the 1990s, a healthy
chunk of that money was being divvied out to actors.
The 1980s had birthed the idea of the superstar actor, the
man or woman whose name could draw in the punters on
opening weekend. And by the 1990s, these thesps were
commanding more and more power. For the massive stars of

the era – Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts,
Mel Gibson, Eddie Murphy, Harrison Ford, Robin Williams,
Jim Carrey et al – this could include script approval, a say over
the director and other casting choices, restrictions on the
filming schedule and copious on-set demands. Demi Moore
reportedly demanded private jets to shepherd her and her

10
entourage around the world for the movies Striptease and
@'B'yCZg^while Jack Nicholson’s star wattage was so blinding in
the 1990s that he was able to negotiate a clause agreeing that
he didn’t have to work when there was LA Lakers game on.

Films That lockbuster movies and superstar actors may

1 TRAINSPOTTING
Defined A Decade
Bolsteredbyablisteringlycooladvertisingcampaign Danny
Boyle’svivaciousadaptationofIrvineWelsh’scultnovelcameto
epitomisetheeraofCoolBritannia
B have defined the ’90s, but it didn’t start out that
way. In 1990 the three top-grossing movies were
Ghost, Home Alone and Pretty Woman – modestly
budgeted, mid-scalers. But fast-forward seven years and the
biggest film was Titanic. In 1998 it was Armageddon. And then,
in 1999, George Lucas bagged the top spot with his long
gestating Star Wars prequel, The Phantom Menace.
Of all the movies to take advantage of the CGI revolution,
2 SEEN
BradPitthasneverbeenbetterthaninDavidFincher’sneo-noir
aboutaNewYorkCityserialkillermurderingvictimsaccordingtothe
it was the film otherwise known as Episode I. Lucas had
always been uncontainably excited about new technologies.
sevendeadlysins He’d helped found ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) in the
mid 1970s and the company found itself leading the way in
 
3 TOYSTORY
Notjusttechnologicallygroundbreaking butanincrediblyrich
movieinitsownright thisfirstPixarfeatureisfunnyandwarmand
computer-generated effects during the ’80s and ’90s.
Having tested out the new technology pimping up his first
featuresspiritedvoiceperformancesfromthelikesofTomHanks three Star Wars films for their Special Edition re-releases in
and TimAllen 1997, Lucas was determined to splash it all over his
directorial return. Although shot on 35mm (he’d wanted to
 
4 THECRYINGGAME
NeilJordan’sclassy genre-twistingthrillerwasanunexpectedhit
intheUS withaudiencesgoingcrazyforitsmuchtalkedabouttwist
shoot it digitally, but the tech wasn’t yet where he needed
it), The Phantom Menace featured more CG effects than any
other motion picture before it, with its digital mascot the
 
5 THEMATRIX
Searinglyiconic fromthebadassfashionstoitsthumping
soundtracktoitsgame-changingspecialeffects theWachowskis’
character Jar-Jar Binks, a fully-pixelled character which,
while groundbreaking, was so poorly received that Lucas
endlesslyinventivecyberthrillerisagenreclassic largely dumped him from the movie’s two sequels.

THE 1990S | CLASSIC FILM

 CLASSIC DECADE
In 1995, Pixar, the digital effects house behind those
eye-grabbing effects in Star Trek II and Young Sherlock Holmes,
unleashed the world’s first CG animated feature, Toy Story.
It’s a strain to remember now how shockingly revolutionary
John Lasseter’s movie really was. Animated features had
been hand-drawn since the earliest days of cinema, but this
was something bracingly new. Industry bible Variety wrote of 10 Films That Defined
its “razzle-dazzle technique and unusual look”, but many
thought it was a passing fancy, like 3D or Smell-O-Vision.
But it’s also true to say that Pixar didn’t change the
A Decade cont...
animation landscape overnight. Of the animated movies
released theatrically in 1999, the vast majority remained
 
6 JURASSICPARK

Eventoday theCGIeffectsofStevenSpielberg’sadaptationof
MichaelCrichton’snovelstandupNeverbeforehaddinosaurslivedand
traditionally drawn. It would take another ten years before breathedonthebigscreenwithsuchrealism
CG movies dominated the animated release schedule.
7
Although blockbuster movies were in the ascendence
during the ’90s, independent cinema was embarking on its  
7 PULPFICTION
IfReservoirDogswastheaperitif thenPulpFictionwasthemain
courseEffortlesslycoolandendlesslyquotable QuentinTarantinohas
own gilded age. The aggressive corporatisation of the big
neverbetteredthisjumblyneo-noirclassic
summer event movie created a thirst for films with a more
singular authorial voice, and cinema discovered its most
original in decades when Reservoir Dogs landed in cinemas in  
8 CHASINGAMY
KevinSmith’sbestfilmtellsthestoryofamalecomicartistBen
AffleckwhofallsinlovewithalesbianJoeyLaurenAdams muchto
the autumn of 1992. Made on a budget of $1.2 million,
theannoyanceofhisbestfriendJasonLee
Quentin Tarantino’s punky, lo-fi crime thriller was
gloriously profane, deliriously violent and quite unlike
anything else out there.  
9 FARGO
TheCoenbrotherscanbealarminglyhitandmiss butthis
snow-drapedtaleseemedtohitthepublic’ssweetspotin while
hooveringupdozensofawardsforthedirectorialsiblings
hough Reservoir Dogs’ box office takings

T ($2.8 million) were modest by the standards

of the decade’s biggest grossing movie (Titanic
made a whopping $2.187 billion!), its success
alerted the studios that money could be made from modestly
budgeted movies distributed on the arthouse circuit. By the
 
10 BOOGIENIGHTS
PaulThomasAnderson’ssecondfeaturewasabreakouthitfor
the -year-olddirectorSetinthemidstofthespornindustry it’s
a star-speckledriotofdisco sexandcocaine
8

end of the 1990s, most of the big studios had formed

independent film divisions, devoted to making movies that
were never intended for mass consumption. By 1996,
independent cinema’s punch was so great that four out of
the five nominees for that year’s Best Picture Academy
Award – Shine, The English Patient, Secrets & Lies and Fargo
– were non-studio movies.
Kevin Smith was another fresh voice discovered in the
early 1990s. His debut feature, Clerks, was low in budget and
low on concept. Made in black and white (and not for artistic
reasons either) and with no story to speak of, the movie
made Smith the posterboy for the slacker generation.
Essentially a series of often screamingly funny duologues,
Clerks was scrappy and unpretty and made a virtue of its
glossness finish.
Though both very different, Smith and Tarantino came to
epitomise the independent cinema of the 1990s. Tarantino
had an unbroken run of classics – Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction
and the underrated Jackie Brown – during the decade, while
Smith has never bettered his ’90s output.
Other directors, later to transition into the studio
mainstream, made their debuts with indie must-sees in the
1990s. Bryan Singer, several years before he became the
main man of the X-Men franchise, made a splash with his
devilishly twisty second feature, the neo-noir The Usual
Suspects, while Steven Soderbergh, who spent much of the
’90s as a darling of the indie scene, later upped sticks to
Warner Bros to make the box-office-busting Ocean’s Eleven
series of films.
Other, more resolutely indie directors made their big
screen bows in the 1990s. Richard Linklater’s debut feature
Slacker (1991) was so light on plot it made Clerks seem like
a John Grisham movie. Meandering, with an almost stream-
of-conciousness structure, this $23,000 quickie made
$1.2 million commercially. Linklater followed it up with the
6

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1990S

 1990s
’70s-set stoner comedy Dazed And Confused, a film so beloved
by Quentin Tarantino he would later include on his list of the
10 greatest films of all time.
Across the pond, British movies in the 1990s finally
inched away from the heritage cinema of Merchant-Ivory.
Richard Curtis’s Four Weddings And A Funeral was a gigantic
hit, making $245.7 million worldwide on a slim $2.8 million
budget and made a star out of the relatively unknown Hugh
Grant. Similarly, Neil Jordan’s curiously undefinable IRA
drama The Crying Game became an unexpected US smash
(though was only a modest success in the UK).
Perhaps the most exciting directorial discovery, in the UK,
during the 1990s was Danny Boyle. Though already in his late
30s at time of his 1994 debut, Shallow Grave, and with a string
of TV credits behind him, he brought an electrifying freshness
to his movies. His second feature, the zeitgeist-seizing
Trainspotting, was an instant classic, a fizzy, uncompromisingly
Scottish celebration of youth on the grim backstreets of
Edinburgh. The movie got Boyle noticed so much that
Hollywood naturally came calling and, for a while at least, he
was the director of the planned Alien Resurrection until he bailed
on the project. He did however up sticks to LA to make the
Ewan McGregor-headlining misfire A Life Less Ordinary in 1997.
The Bond series finally emerged from hibernation in 1995,
after legal issues kept the franchise dormant for five
agonising years. Still, the rest did it good. Reappearing with
a more audience-friendly Bond (Pierce Brosnan, replacing
Timothy Dalton) and a reshuffle behind-the-scenes (with
9 ailing long-time producer Cubby Broccoli handing over the
reigns to his daughter and stepson), GoldenEye made
$352,194,034 at the box office – a big jump on from the

previous film’s $156.1 million. Bond was indeed back.
The 007 movies continued their onward march
throughout the 1990s, providing the foundation for the
Daniel Craig reboot in the following decade. But maybe that’s
what 1990s cinema really was – a laying of the groundwork
for the next decade’s movies and trends. While digital
technology established itself in the ’90s, it was in the
noughties when it properly took root. Today, 20-odd years
after the fact, ’90s cinema doesn’t look too different to
our own, and we’re even now beginning to trade in 1990s
nostalgia, from Independence Day: Resurgence to
M+3yMkZbglihmmbg` to Jurassic World to Dumb And Dumber To.
It’s easy to scoff at ’80s movies, but movies of the 1990s
are somehow Teflon-coated. Look at Terminator 2 or Jurassic
Park and they could have been made last week. The 1990s
is the decade that gave us the cinema of today. CF

10
REX

THE 1990S | CLASSIC FILM

 1990s
ROBIN
WILLIAMS
MORK. DOUBTFIRE. KEATING. THE GENIE.
AND… PATCH ADAMS. WE SPOKE TO THE
OSCAR-WINNING FUNNYMAN IN 2010.
hen it was
W
announced in
August 2014 that
Robin Williams
had died, the
world mourned.

We’d lost a true great, of both comedy and
drama, small and big screen, and tributes
flowed in from around the world as
devastated friends and fans alike grieved
a comedian, actor, husband and father
who was gone far too soon.
After studying theatre at Juilliard, and
honing his wild improvisational skills on
the ’70s nightclub circuit, Williams made
an inauspicious debut in Robert Altman’s
studio botch-job, Popeye. Fortunately, he
picked up the pace in 1982’s The World
According To Garp before Good Morning,
Vietnam and Dead Poets Society launched
him as a fully-fledged movie star.
In the early days, Williams brought his
antic jesterhood to bear even in dramatic
roles – his Oscar-winning turn as Matt
Damon’s kindly shrink in Good Will
Hunting being a rare exception. He also
showed a penchant for maudlin-drenched
indulgence. But as his ’90s box-office
muscle waned, so did his schmaltzy jaunts
and the actor began exploring his darker,
creepier side in the likes of One Hour Photo
and Insomnia.
We met up with him in 2010 before the
release of Bobcat Goldthwait’s World’s
Greatest Dad, which marked a welcome
return to jet-black comedy.
From your very first film, Popeye, it
seems you were determined to carve an
REX
CLASSIC FILM | THE 1990S
WOR DS MAT T MUELLER
eclectic path on screen. And yet
Altman’s film took a hammering…
Totally. The weird thing about Popeye is it
was like Ed Wood by the end. They pulled
the money because Heaven’s Gate had just
happened. The special effects had left by
that point, so Shelley [Duvall]’s in the
water with an octopus with a mechanism
that’s been taken out. So she’s going,
“Heeeellllppp!” and the thing’s falling
off her and she’s having to put it back on
her, like [reaches over to his left arm
and throws it over his shoulder]
“Heeeellllppp!” Robert Evans, who was
coked out of his tits at the time, said,
“Howarewegonnaendthemovie? Idon’t
knowhowwe’regonnaendthemovie…”
I joked, “Well, I could walk on the water
like Jesus.” And he went, “Yes! Let’s do
it!” And that ended up being the end of
the movie… It was a perfect storm of
addiction and alcoholism and craziness
but I wouldn’t trade the experience. They
used to say that working with Altman is
like getting pushed off a cliff: you may
not know what you’re doing but you’ll
do some interesting screaming on the
way down.
Did Popeye’s failure change your
attitude about the kind of film actor
you wanted to be?
Well, it certainly changed my idea of,
“You’re going to be a star!” That went
right out the window. It humbled my ass
up really quick. For some people it’s a
sweet movie but I know what it was and
what it wasn’t, and it didn’t work all the
way through.
In the ’80s you made quirky films like
Moscow On The Hudson and The World
According To Garp… Did the studios ever
try to shoehorn you into the broad
comedy vehicles that made Eddie
Murphy a star?
I don’t know what they were trying to do
– it was me just trying to keep working.
Thank God I got offered Garp and Moscow
On The Hudson… But it was Good Morning,
Vietnam and Dead Poets Society that kind of
kicked the door open in terms of dramatic
roles and really revived it for me. That was
thanks to Jeffrey Katzenberg – they used
to say that he waited outside Betty Ford to
offer actors roles that would jump start
their careers. Both those films kicked it
into gear for me. Being offered Dead Poets
was such a gift but then to have it directed
by Peter Weir… They wanted to change
the name and change the whole movie to
be Mr. Keating’s Way and he went, “No, we
signed on to make Dead Poets – let’s finish
that movie.”
Those projects made it clear that you
could tackle strong dramatic material.
I trained as an actor. That’s why I went to
Juilliard. Even a movie like Mrs. Doubtfire is
character acting – it’s like puppeteering.
Inhabiting this female character and
making her real and funny sold the movie.
But at the same time you’re talking about
divorce and saying don’t use your kids as
cannon fodder, treat them with love and
maybe you can get through this. Some
people were horribly offended by that and
other people went, “Thank God, that
movie got me through my divorce.”

 CLASSIC STAR
When you won the Oscar for Good Will
Hunting, did you see that as the ultimate
affirmation?
It’s weird – it lasted for about a week, maybe
two. For the first day it’s like, “Yay, Good Will
Hunting, way to go!” A couple of days later
it’s, “Yay, that movie you won an Oscar
in…” And then a couple of weeks later:
“Hey, Mork!” It was sweet but it didn’t
change perceptions other than the fact that
whenever you’re advertised, it’s [deep-
throated trailer-man voice], “Academy
Award winner…” It was created to be part
of the marketing process.
Does it mean anything to you personally?
It meant a lot because doing that movie was
a great experience. Working with Gus and
Ben and Matt was a gift. Did I walk away
going, “I’m proud of it”? Yeah. Did I go,
“Now I’m acknowledged for being a great
ac-TOR”? No, I went, “I’ve still got work to
do.” You’ve still gotta go out and find work.
A lot of the time in people’s careers, the
work goes away after you win it. I’ve still got
to drum up business.
After that, you had a run of films like
What Dreams May Come, Patch Adams,
Bicentennial Man…

Patch Adams made money. Bicentennial Man
didn’t make money and should have been
done CG. What Dreams May Come could have
been extraordinary but then they got anxious
and started to have test screenings, which
you can’t do for a movie like that. That’s how
we ended up with this weird ending that was
just, “Whaatttt?! Why did you do that?”
That’s a movie that people either love or
despise. Yeah, there was a series of movies
that just went, “And… Thank you.”
You were accused of being deeply
schmaltzy during that phase of your
high
with
– it’s not even fashion, it’s just the ones
Hoffman
that are still funny. Will Ferrell is always
CLASSIC FILM | THE 1990S
career, both in choice of material and
your own performances…
Sometimes that’s true but also in the face
of that, I did movies like One Hour Photo,
Insomnia, The Final Cut… They were not
sentimental. In One Hour Photo you have
a character that’s almost like a high-
functioning autistic. It was very freeing. To
find those characters – that’s the gift. You
have to go out and pursue them.
But looking back at that earlier phase,
do you see yourself as a strongly
sentimental person…
Like oh my god, sometimes…
…and were you seeking out syrupy
material?
No, I think they just came my way and I
inhabited them. Am I? Yeah, I think that
I can be. I can be very [in a gooey child’s
voice], “Oh look, the kitten!” You kind of go,
“Why are you that weepy?” And sometimes
you have to go, “Fight it! Don’t go weepy,
fucker!” I think that’s where you have to
look at something and go, “Hmmm… Did
I go too far?”
Do directors ever steer you away
from that?
Oh, they do. I mean, they don’t have to – I
steer myself away from that. But that’s why
for me, the most fun recently is to do
animation. You know the chances of being
that way are diminished.
Speaking of animation, when Disney
hired you to Aladdin, your brilliance paved
the way for A-list voices to dominate
animated movies…
Well, it was the first idea of hiring comics to
be funny in the characters and, for better or
worse, that kicked it into a whole other gear.
Now you see them hiring comics for
HOOKED
Flying
Dustin
I’M STILL PROUD OF
TOYS BECAUSE IT’S
SUCH A WEIRD AND
WONDERFUL MOVIE
everything – and it’s great and I know every
comic who’s done it loves doing it. It’s a
brilliant gift. Mike Myers said, “You can fuck
around for 40 hours and then they’ll draw it!
Fuckin’ right!” Or I can be a penguin, a
Hispanic penguin, which I would not be
offered in real life. I heard recently that Andy
Serkis is opening a school in London called
Imaginarium for people to act in CG movies.
He created the greatest CG character in
Gollum and that will be the future – it’s
better to not be terrified of it.
Is it coincidence that your “dark period”
– One Hour Photo, Death To Smoochy,
Insomnia – coincided with your first
stand-up tour in 16 years in 2002?
That was actually an economic decision. But
also, the 2002 tour was almost an emotional
response to 9/11. Whoopi Goldberg and
I performed in Washington not long after
9/11 and people treated it like we were
breaking a siege. The value of comedy then
– it was like, “Come on, man, we can’t take
it any more…” And then we got eight years
of Bush – how am I going to medicate my
way through that? The recent tour started
off as an economic thing and became, “Wait
a minute, there’s a lot to talk about.” But
initially it was purely economic: movies
weren’t coming in so let’s go back out on the
road. Thank God I have that outlet.
Do comic actors go in and out of fashion
more than dramatic performers?
I think so. But the ones that stay in fashion
funny to me but does he necessarily always
make movies that are big? But he’s fearless,
he’s not afraid to be totally goofy and at
the same time very sweet. And Jonah Hill
– he’s really good. The two of them are
great in exploring that type of out-there
behaviour, but at the same time making it
believable and scary.
You mentioned Altman earlier – what’s it
like to work with auteurs like Chris Nolan
or Steven Spielberg?
Well, I didn’t work with Steven on one of his
auteur movies. When we were doing Hook,
he made no bones about wanting to make
that into this big action spectacle. But I had
a great time working with him – he was a

WRAPPED
counsels
Matt
in
GoodWillHunting
great friend and it was just wonderful to be
in something so huge. For me, I just loved
the fact I got to fly. Even the guys flying me
were going, “We can’t do another take!” But
to work with someone like Chris Nolan or
Mark Romanek or Bobcat is wonderful. And
Gus Van Sant – he’s more of an auteur guy.
You realise you’re not acting and that’s what
he wants. He’s like, “Just talk, just say it –
you don’t have to worry.” And after a while
you think, “Oh, I’m not acting – cool!” And
then all this behaviour comes out, where you
can be awkward, strange, all the other
dysfunctional stuff we are as humans.
You and Spielberg both took a drubbing
for Hook…
Yeah, but I talk to people who watched it as
children and loved it. It was made for them.
They were planning to make that movie into
a theme park right off the bat and then
when it didn’t do as well, it was like,
“Whoops!” They were rewriting that as we
were doing it and that’s always dangerous.
How do you view some of your other
disparaged films, like Flubber or Toys,
with hindsight?
Flubber was a case where they just wanted
to CG it, they didn’t give a shit about any of
the other stuff. We’re going, “You’ve got to
care about these characters or they’re not
going to give a shit about the CG.” And
they went, “No, the CG’s what sells it.”
And we’re going, “Good luck.” But I’m
still proud of Toys because it’s such a weird
and wonderful movie. At the time, I think
it was just so strange that the studio
went, “We don’t know how to deal with
this.” That one I watch and go, “I’m OK with
the fact that it didn’t kick off.”
How did you find working with that other
mad genius, Terry Gilliam?
Oh, he’s the best. I would drive him crazy
with late night phone calls on Fisher King,
going, “What do you think?” He’d go, “I
think you’re doing OK – don’t call me.” That
movie is so powerful for me: the scene of all
the people dancing in Grand Central Station
is one of the most beautiful fantasy scenes
I’ve ever seen in a movie, and the idea of
New York as being both heaven and hell
– having lived in New York, it can be both.
His storytelling gelled with his
imagination there…
Terry’s an animator and if he can animate it,
he thinks, “Why can’t we do it?” You want
them to give him a big CG movie. He’s so
gifted; working with him is a blast. I’m one
of the few who’s done it twice. When I did
[The Adventures of Baron] Munchausen…
I became a survivor of a Gilliam movie.
Munchausen was notoriously difficult…
I knew at one point that things were going to
go slightly crazy when he asked them to
make a siege cannon and the Italian crew
went off and made him a real siege cannon
that weighed several tons and needed 300
people to pull it into place. And he went,
“Noooo! You could have done it out of
fibreglass!” “No, Terreee, look, we make-a
da real siege cannon.” It was fucking insane.
I like your socks by the way…
Thanks, they’re Chinese sperm swimmers.
SHRINK
Williams
Damon
Vasectomy socks. In memory of… the boys
who didn’t make it.
You said that you were offered both the

Joker and the Riddler. Really?
Yes, and they’ve now made it seem like I’m
lobbying to play the Riddler in the new
movie. I was once offered the Joker, then
they gave it to Jack Nicholson, then they
offered me the Riddler and they gave it to
Jim Carrey. I’ve been punked twice, don’t
punk me again! Play the Diddler? No, I can’t
do that! And now I get the angry people
saying, “He should never play that part!”
It’s Chris’ call, man. To work with him again
– oh God, I’d love to, it was a great
experience on Insomnia. But… [whispers]
Andy Serkis – he’d make a great Riddler. He
could be part CG and part insane.
Are indie movies the way forward?
Either way. Altman said at the Independent
Spirit Awards, “Listen, all you
motherfuckers are here celebrating your
independence but if a studio offered you
a movie, you would fucking whore out
right now…” And they all went, “Yeah!”
Still, surely you have freedom in indie
movies that you don’t on a studio project?
Just because it’s off the radar and they don’t
test-screen the movies because they can’t
afford to. The most frightening process is
test screenings, where the audience can
access the brakes. Barry Levinson said the
greatest comment he ever read was after
a screening of Rain Man, there was a card
that said, “I kept waiting for the little guy
to snap out of it.” CF
THE 1990S | CLASSIC FILM


CLASSIC FILM | THE 1990S

 
From a hopping desk lamp to talking cars and a stolen fish, Pixar started
small before going on to save the house that mouse built. Are you sitting
comfortably? Then let’s begin… WORDSJONATHANCROCKERANDJAMIERUSSELL

B
OBBING HELPLESSLY LIKE A TINY CORK the Mouse House for real. But Walt’s kingdom wasn’t the
A -YEAR-OLD BOY DRIFTS AWAY IN THE magical place he had dreamed of.
MIDDLE OF THE FREEZING ATLANTIC OCEAN “Disney was really sort of dead when I got there,” recalls
With every minute, he’s dragged further and Lasseter. “You got the feeling after a while that Disney animation
further away from his father, who’s also been had reached a certain plateau technically with 101 Dalmatians.
caught in the rip current that’s left them treading People like me and Tim Burton were looked at as rabble-
water far out to sea. Darkness falls. By now, the rousers.” Apart from the loud Hawaiian shirts that matched his
father can barely see the boy. He’s scared. His son pink, eager young face, Lasseter was just another Disney
has autism. Jellyfish begin to sting them. The man animator. Until two of his friends showed him a sequence from
calls out: “To infinity…” an experimental movie called Tron. As he sat in a darkened room
“And beyond!” cries the boy, laughing faintly, now nearly watching neon bikes streak and shatter across a 3D grid, Lasseter
three miles away from his father. The man can’t see it, but the realised he was looking at the future. “The minute I saw the
boy is pumping his fist in the air like Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear. It light-cycle sequence, which had such dimensionality and
carries on like this, until, more than 12 hours later, a Coast Guard solidity, it was like a little door in my head opening to a whole
crew picks them up, cold but alive. After that, no one could say new world,” he says.
that watching cartoons was bad for you. Lasseter tried to enthuse Disney about CG by animating
That true story, reported by newspapers in 2008, was just one 30 seconds of Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are using
more incredible triumph for Pixar. Since Toy Story, the animation computer-generated backdrops. In a case of amusing myopia,
geniuses have become one of the most acclaimed film studios Disney was too busy trying to figure out how to battle years of
in the history of cinema. Like James Cameron and Avatar, John slumping box-office to worry about experimenting with untested
Lasseter and Toy Story invented a revolutionary new way of technology. It was 1981 and there was no such thing as a CG
making movies. animated feature. Three years later, Lasseter pitched The Brave
Thank Lasseter’s mother. As an art teacher, she encouraged Little Toaster, based on a children’s book told from the point of
him to get up early on Saturdays to watch the cartoons. “Even view of toys. Disney passed. Lasseter moved on. He then took
back when I was a kid I remember thinking, ‘That’s the job for a job at the computer-graphics unit of Lucasfilm, where he
me!’” he says. In high school, Lasseter wrote to the Disney immediately helped conjure CG milestones including the Genesis
studios and they quickly snapped him up – as a sweeper in effect in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan and the stained glass knight
Disneyland. After graduating in 1979, Lasseter went to work in in Young Sherlock Holmes.

THE 1990S | CLASSIC FILM

 CLASSIC MOVIE
EXODUS
GEORGE LUCAS WASN’T HAVING
ANYWHERE NEAR AS MUCH FUN
His divorce, a drop-off in Star Wars revenues and the catastrophic
performance of Howard The Duck had left the beardy Hollywood
mogul unusually strapped for cash. Lasseter had been working
for Lucasfilm for three years when Lucas decided to sell off his
computer division to focus on filmmaking. Enter Apple
co-founder Steve Jobs, who handed $5m to George and
pumped another $5m into his new computing company. They
renamed it Pixar.
Jobs’ core group of about 45 Lucasfilm hotshots, including
Lasseter, was initially used by Disney to figure out a faster,
process for laborious 2D animation. They designed a
revolutionary 3D graphics program called RenderMan, capable
of creating a 3D animated scene packed with colour and detail.
It was expensive and time consuming, but the results were
amazing: it allowed Pixar’s people to achieve a realistic CG never
before seen on the big screen. James Cameron became one of its
biggest fans, using it for The Abyss and Terminator 2.
Lasseter had been busy, too. His witty short Luxo Jr – about
anthropomorphic desk lamps, one an exasperated parent, the

STORY TIME
other a playful child – was the first massive step forward for
Pixar, becoming the first 3D computer-animated movie to be ONTHECARDS
Above Hamm and
Oscar nommed. Then he went one better: 1988’s Tin Toy won the IT WAS A SLOW START LASSETER HAD
Mr Potato Head call
Oscar for Best Animated Short. A series of hit TV ads confirmed NEVER WRITTEN A FEATURE-LENGTH SCRIPT each other’s bluff
Lasseter as Pixar’s golden boy. New Disney honchos Michael But his team hit on an image that ended up in the middle of their
Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg realised they’d let a serious talent film: a car driving off and abandoning a toy in the middle of TOYROMANCE
slip through their fingers and tried to woo the director back. No nowhere. “We all had that lost toy that we felt was looking for us Below left Woody
chance. “I was having too much fun,” says Lasseter. “I felt I was as much as we were looking for it,” says co-scripter Andrew and Bo share

on to something new – we were pioneers.” Stanton. Based on Lasseter’s Oscar-winning Tin Toy, their a moment
But Pixar’s future looked black. The company had already treatment followed a tin soldier, Tinny, trying to make its way
lost $60m of Jobs’ money. He was depressed and thinking of home after being lost at a highway rest stop. Leaning on the
selling. So when Katzenberg, hugely impressed by Pixar’s ideas of screenwriting theorist Robert McKee, Toy Story quickly
shorts and software, offered them a contract to produce three evolved into a buddy movie like 48 Hrs or The Defiant Ones. Tinny
feature films, Pixar’s staff were stunned. Not least because they became a spaceman whose named changed from Lunar Larry to
were pretty sure CG feature films wouldn’t be possible for Morph to Tempus and finally Buzz Lightyear (after Buzz Aldrin).
another five years. To pull it off, Pixar needed money for more Named after Western actor Woody Strode, Buzz’s partner
staff and more equipment. Katzenberg told Jobs that he never began life as a ventriloquist’s dummy. But when Disney execs
paid more than $15m for an animated film and Jobs finally decided his flapping jaw looked “creepy”, Woody became a
accepted the contract. Katzenberg had outfoxed him – Beauty stuffed cowboy doll with a pull-string, based on Lasseter’s
:g]yMa^;^Zlm had cost more than $32m to produce. Pixar’s favourite toy, a Casper The Friendly Ghost. “My parents knew
first film had to be a hit or the company was doomed. They that I’d fallen asleep when Casper stopped talking,” he says. “It
turned to Lasseter… still talks today, only it’s so worn out that I’m the only one who
understands what it’s saying.”
They were the perfect odd couple. Old and new. Roy Rogers
and Buck Rogers. When Lasseter put together a 30-second trailer
to show off the characters and the animation, Disney execs were
blown away. They appointed Joel Cohen, Alec Sokolow and later
Joss Whedon to help develop the script. Toy Story was a go.
The toy box filled up quickly. Hasbro approved Mr. Potato
Head but not G.I. Joe. Pixar renamed him Combat Carl and
used him anyway. Whedon thought Barbie was perfect to
save Woody and Buzz from their destructive next-door-
neighbour Sid. “She’s Sarah Connor in a pink convertible,
all business and very cool,” he said. Mattel execs refused
to let their girl play and the team went with the docile
Bo Peep instead.
Right from the start, Lasseter wanted
Tom Hanks to voice Woody. Still gaunt and
goateed after Philadelphia, the actor agreed to
watch 30 seconds of footage that Lasseter had
soundtracked with his voice from Turner And
Hooch. Hanks roared with laughter: “When
do we start?” Billy Crystal turned down Buzz

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1990S

 DON’T TOY STORY
CTAhetLo L US
did ysthat
n’tmakethe movie to come: a character ventures out into the real world and
TScut 
learns to appreciate his friends and family. Good news for Toy
Story, bad for Hanks and Allen. “We had to rerecord every single
line of dialogue,” remembers Hanks, with a wince.
If Hanks thought he had it tough, he should have spoken to
the animation team. Lasseter’s 27 animators were digital
SLIME puppeteers who had to coax winning performances out of the
What thesp prowess programmers’ 400 computer models. Woody was most complex
does a pot of goo of all, with more than 723 motion controls to animate his actions.
really have to offer? His mouth alone was operated by 58 controls. “It’s easy to make
Making a fart noise
things look perfect,” says Lasseter. “We had to make things look
elicits juvenile giggles
but this toy is the very more organic. Every leaf and blade of grass had to be created. We
definition of one note had to give the world a sense of history. So the doors are banged
up, the floors have scuffs.”
It was in these tiny emotional details that Lasseter discovered
the secret to what would make Pixar’s films connect so fully
with audiences – from Slinky Dog’s foot twitching in his sleep
to the softness in the eyes of Woody and Buzz. “John was able
PADDINGTON to take animation that was limited to special effects,” says
BEAR Disney exec Thomas Schumacher, “that was perceived as cold,
Sadly the loveable
unappealing and slick, and project into it his warmth and charm
marmalade gobbler
never got to his and dimensionality.”
audition Something When a difficult phase of the production was achieved, a
‘I WAS NOT PREPARED about catching the
wrong train and ending
calypso band would appear unannounced in the Pixar hallways
and the team would form a spontaneous conga line and go

FOR HOW TOUGH THE up in Dorset

dancing through the offices. That was the creative culture at
Pixar. Employees skateboarded through maze-like hallways

RECORDINGS WERE’ filled with sweetie jars, arriving at offices packed with toys.
Lasseter’s production team even created a special director’s

TOM HANKS POOCHIE

High maintenance
chair for him: a wheelchair fitted with a drink holder, a horn
and multi-coloured bike streamers. Even Uncle Walt never
had one of those.


– he regretted it later – and Katzenberg took the role to Home Poochie turned up
two hours late refused
HAPPY ENDING
Improvement star Tim Allen.
to audition until she’d
Neither man had done an animated film. Neither were paid
been brushed and did
superstar salaries. Neither knew what they would sign up for: a very bad thing in the AFTER FOUR YEARS AND 

MACHINE-
two years standing alone at a microphone. Hanks began dreading corner when she HOURS PIXAR DELIVERED A -MINUTE FINAL CUT
his recording sessions. “I felt like Patrick McGoohan in The suspected she hadn’t Each one of the movie’s 1,560 shots had been created on
got the part
Prisoner,” he recalls. “I’m standing there yelling the same things computers – Toy Story had unlocked a new doorway to making
over and over. I was not prepared for how tough it was. I had to fully CG cinema. Disney’s tradition cel-based animation
get into this almost quasi-hypnotic state of delirium imagining looked like watching paint dry by comparison. “In 2D cel
I’m in this other place.” animation, if you want to slow down an arm movement 15 per
Still, things were going well, until Disney’s executive vice cent, you have to go back and erase all the animation and
president of animation turned to Lasseter and said, “Gee, John, redraw it,” explains Lasseter. “Here we just move a key frame,
BIGTRAK
when are the characters going to sing?” Never, Lasseter curtly and it’s done quickly.” And where The Lion King cost $45m and
The six-wheeled tank
informed him. Disney weren’t happy. But they finally allowed followed commands to employed 800 animators, Toy Story had a $30m budget and staff
Lasseter to hire Randy Newman to score the movie instead. The the letter with the odd of 110. Still, Disney spent $100m promoting the film. If this film
director’s victory would be short lived. crash but couldn’t flopped, it would flop big.
think independently On the opening weekend, Toy Story recouped its production
Couldn’t even leave
costs by earning $39.1m. One week after opening day, Pixar went
BLACKFRIDAY without being
programmed to public on the stock exchange and more than doubled its value
TEN MONTHS AFTER PRODUCTION BEGAN PIXAR instantly, turning Jobs into a billionaire. By the end of Toy Story’s
PRESENTED AN EARLY DRAFT OF THE FILM theatrical release, the film had earned more than $200m. Pixar
Disney took one look at it and immediately shut down was now a buzzword for brilliance. CG animation had arrived.
production. Why? “The original Woody was a thundering Along with Toy Story’s gratifying screenplay and music Oscar
asshole,” admits screenwriter Whedon. Attempting to avoid nominations, Lasseter received an Academy Special Achievement
cutesiness and layer the film with adult wit, Pixar had gone too SYLVANIAN Award in 1996 “for the development and inspired application of
far. The movie wasn’t fun. Buzz was a do-gooder. Woody was FAMILIES techniques that have made possible the first feature-length
sarcastic. “Guys, no matter how much you try to fix it,” Disney Talk about dull All computer-animated film.”
these woodland
animation chief Peter Schneider told them “it just isn’t creatures wanted to Today, with Disney having bought back Pixar for a staggering
working.” That day, 19 November 1993, would be dubbed “Black do was sit and knit $7.4bn, the company is still building on the revolution that Toy
Friday” by Pixar staff. Also accosted Rex for Story ignited. After Up became their first movie in 3D and also
Given three months to save the movie, Lasseter was enrolled his autograph in the their first to be nominated for Best Picture, Toy Story 3 went
toilet and attempted
in a screenwriting class. He re-emerged with a new script, a more stereoscopic and 4 is due in 2019. You know where the rest of the
to squirrel away bits of
likeable Woody and a theme that would run through every Pixar Mr Potato Head story goes. To infinity… CF

THE 1990S | CLASSIC FILM

 1990s
TIM
BURTON
WITH OVER 30 YEARS MAKING MOVIES, TIM
BURTON IS THAT RARE THING: A STUDIO
DIRECTOR WITH AN INDEPENDENT VISION
rriving in Belsize
A
Park’s Air Studios,
Tim Burton shuffles
across the polished
wooden floors graced
in the past by
everyone from Paul McCartney to Peter
Gabriel. With his Robert Smith haircut,
crumpled jacket, jeans and shirt, topped
off with a checked scarf, his signature
style is – to quote Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel
– “none more black”.
The same goes for his filmmaking
sensibility, you might think, from 1985
debut Pee-wee’s Big Adventure right up to
2016’s Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar
Children. Not that this has done any harm
to his numbers. Burton’s Midas touch has
seen his films gross over $4bn, making
him one of Hollywood’s most successful
directors of the modern era – taking on
musicals (Sweeney Todd), children’s
classics (Charlie And The Chocolate Factory,
Alice In Wonderland), comic-book legends
(Batman), TV soaps (Dark Shadows), even
trading cards (Mars Attacks!).
Only his much-derided “re-imagining”
of Planet Of The Apes failed to chime. But
when he’s able to produce projects of such
feeling as Edward Scissorhands or Ed Wood,
his first two collaborations with actor-of-
choice Johnny Depp, it would be churlish
to dwell on this misstep.
As he talks, peppering his speech with
the phrase “weird” with alarming
regularity, Burton is actually disarmingly
normal. If he fits in here far better than he
ever did in California, it might be that his
temperament – and his films – seem
REX
CLASSIC FILM | THE 1990S
WOR DS JAMES MO T TR AM
suited to British idiosyncrasies. Burton
prizes individuality. “I always felt strongly
about my own ideas,” he explains. “I
never questioned that too much.”
Remove the lavish candy-coloured
visuals, dotty Danny Elfman scores and
macabre humour, and it’s this self-
assurance that dominates his work. We
spoke to him in 2012, before the release of
Frankenweenie, about his eclectic career.
2012 has been a busy year for you,
directing the live-action Dark Shadows,
producing Abraham Lincoln: Vampire
Hunter and now overseeing the animated
Frankenweenie. Why this hive of activity?
I wouldn’t choose to do it like that! It was
three different studios. I would’ve spread
them out. But sometimes you’re not doing
anything, and sometimes it just happens.
I’ve done it before. On an animation,
because it’s such a slow process, it’s
actually quite fun to be working on that
and live-action at the same time. It’s like
a cleansing process for your brain.
The last time you did live-action and
animation simultaneously was Charlie
And The Chocolate Factory and Corpse
Bride. Did you suffer from studio
interference at all?
On Corpse Bride, they were really good,
because it was a fairly low-budget movie,
and they didn’t really understand it
anyway! But they were cool – they let it
happen. And on Charlie, they were actually
pretty good about it too. They actually left
us alone during the shooting. I think the
problem I have with the studios is all the
marketing and the merchandising, which
I don’t have anything to do with. It’s out
there and I just don’t like that stuff. I find
it personally offensive.
Talking of studios, Frankenweenie was
initially a short that got shelved by
Disney. Now you’re back with them,
turning this into a feature. What made
you return to this story?
It personally meant something to me. But
the opportunity to do it stop-motion,
black-and-white, expand on it, with other
kids, other monsters, other characters… it
just seemed like the right medium and the
right project. So even though we’re
revisiting something I did a long time ago,
it feels new and special.
What is it you love about animation?
It’s a really artistic medium. All these
artists are working on a piece of art, as
opposed to a business. It’s almost like pure
cinema because this technique has been
around since the beginning of cinema,
really… especially stop-motion. It’s a
slightly lost art form, although there’s
more being done now than there was in the
past. There’s something that’s so beautiful
about it. Just to be able to touch and feel
the puppets and move them, there’s
something magical about it. You wish
everybody could experience it, because it’s
hard to talk about it. If you felt them and
saw the intricacy of the movement, you’d
see it’s quite a beautiful art form.
The film sees young Victor re-animate
his dead dog Sparky. What is it about


 CLASSIC DIRECTOR
the relationship a child has with his pet
that seems to resonate with you?
When you’re young, it’s the first pure
relationship that you have. If you’re lucky
enough to have a pet that you love, it
connects right to your heart. And I was lucky
enough to have a special pet that I had that
kind of relationship with. And the
Frankenstein element is wish-fulfilment
in a way. I always found those Frankenstein
movies quite emotional, so it seemed like
a natural connection to combine the two.
What was it about those old monster
movies that you loved so much?
My parents told me before I could walk or
talk, I liked monster movies. And I did. I
loved watching them. Maybe as a reaction…
the Southern-California environment is
very bright and light. It’s white and square.
There’s not a lot of texture to it, so I often
thought it was a way to get in your life what
was lacking. Also, I always thought
monsters were never the bad guys. They
always seemed like they had the most
emotional qualities to them. So I think it was
a combination of things. When you have a
place that always seems sunny or bright, it
was a way to experience other things.
You grew up in Burbank. What was family
life like?
I didn’t come from a very communicative
family. I didn’t have a lot of verbal
storytellers around me; I wasn’t a verbal
person. My family maybe spoke 10
sentences within a couple of years. We were
in the Ingmar Bergman family – vacant
stares across the table. At the same time, my
father had another way of telling stories. He
had false teeth and when a full moon came
out, he would pretend to turn into a
werewolf. It was magical – a sense of story
and magic I always appreciated.
Not being “a verbal person”, is this why,
right from your early films, you always
worked with screenwriters rather than
write a script yourself?
&
WHITE
Yes. But I always work very closely with the
Depp
as
Ed
Wood
writer. I actually like having a writer because
it means I’m able to step outside a little bit.
It’s crucial to me, because I’m not a real
overly technical person. So I really feel
whatever I’m doing… it’s important to me
to feel somewhat like a screenwriter, though
I’ve never actually done it on my own. I try to
make each thing personal and feel it as
strongly as possible.
Are there films you particularly hold close
to your heart from the early years?
I feel strangely close to all of them, because
you spend time working on them – even the
ones that don’t turn out so well. They all
CLASSIC FILM | THE 1990S
hold a certain place in your heart. But there
are ones that are maybe a bit more special to
me, like Edward Scissorhands or Ed Wood. The
Nightmare Before Christmas meant a lot to me
because that was something designed early
in my career.
What early lessons did you learn?
That once you get the moniker of being the
weirdo, no matter what you do, that label
sticks. I also realised early on that you live
and die with each film. Like a birth and a
death, within a film. Then it’s back to square
one again, trying to find a thing and trying
to get it going. I realised that it’s always that
way. It’s just the nature of film. There’s so
many people involved, so much money –
even if it’s a low-budget film.
Is it always a battle, however well your
last film did at the box office?
I realised that pretty early on. The first
couple, I was lucky to have success, and I
thought it was going to be easier. But in fact
the opposite thing happens. There’s more of
a fixation and a focus. On the first Batman,
there’s no talk of the word “franchise”.
Then it becomes like this extra added thing,
this expectation. And films are always better
when you don’t expect anything, and then
you’re surprised. That’s exciting – but that
gets taken away to a degree.
Instead, you went off and did Edward
Scissorhands. Was that easy?
No. After doing Batman, I wanted to do a
low-budget movie. But because you do
Batman, people think you’re only making
these big movies. You try to convince them
you’re not, and then they know you’re in the
movie business, and then they think you’re
lying to them! Which sometimes people do,
I guess. So you have to walk away from lots
of things, because it’s impossible.
Sometimes these things turn into bigger
deals than they need to.
What do you think now Chris Nolan has
put his stamp on the Dark Knight?
When I did Batman, that was regenerating
from earlier incarnations of it. I think you
see it in comic books. They’re constantly
regenerating themselves. I think its part of
the cycle of life. And things just move on. I
recall back to when I was doing Batman, and
how worried they all were that it was too
dark. Now, it looks like a light-hearted
romp. It’s Batman On Ice, you know? It’s
interesting because it was such a struggle
to get that, at the time.
Haven’t you dealt with the “too dark”
label throughout your whole career?
I remember when Nightmare came out, they
were always worried that it was too scary for
children. And there were things I used to
watch on TV as a child that were much more
graphic and horrible! It’s happened to me on
almost every film – “It’s too much for
children!” Then a few years later, it’s
actually quite tame by current standards.
How did you feel coming back to Batman
Returns when you did?
Something I shouldn’t be doing is sequels…
I don’t think I do that very well.
Even though Batman Returns was the sixth
highest-grosser of 1992…
I feel close to that movie. It’s not for those
reasons. I’m actually trying to protect the
studio more, by saying that I’m not
necessarily a good person to be doing that,
even though I might like these characters,
and the idea of exploring them further is a
good thing. But exploring characters and
finding new, weird avenues is not necessarily
what a studio wants from a sequel.
How do you feel when a film you’ve made
touches a nerve with people?
It’s nice when it connects with people, but
it’s also distorting. Ed Wood got the best
reviews of any film I’ve ever done, and
people tell me they like it. I get more verbal
response to it [than to anything else]! But it
seems the only people who talk to me are
the only people that saw it! That was it! So
there’s a distorting aspect to the whole
process. The one that you feel has all this
human contact, you’d think that would be
the most successful. So it’s hard to know.
Was it a real battle to get Ed Wood made?
Yeah, they didn’t want to make that movie.
What memories do you cherish?
Well, I remember with Martin Landau, I
didn’t want to see him as Martin. I was
dealing with Bela Lugosi! It’s not that I get
that into “Method”, but you work such long
hours, and you just keep it in that zone.
BLACK
Johnny

AHEAD
with
Johnny
Depp
for
SleepyHollow
ONCE YOU GET THE
MONIKER OF BEING
THE WEIRDO, THAT

LABEL STICKS
After 1996’s Mars Attacks! you came very
close to directing Superman Lives with
Nicolas Cage. What was going to be
your approach?
Of all the characters, Superman was the
most iconic. But at the same time, it was this
big strong guy who puts on glasses and
nobody knows the difference. So I thought
for the first time we could really make that
more believable somehow, and show what
it’s like to be Superman. We got pretty far
into it – costume tests, effects tests, location
scouting. It was just… oh, yeah, the script!
You went on to headless-horseman folk
tale Sleepy Hollow. Was this really a way to
ease the Superman Lives disappointment?
I guess the question is: what says something
to you? After working on a project like
Superman, which didn’t go anywhere, I felt
a certain way…then I’m presented with this
character with no head. I could completely
relate to it immediately! So you have to
know how you feel at any given time, and let
it take its course that way.
Sleepy Hollow did allow you to work with
some personal heroes – like Christopher
Lee and Michael Gough, Alfred from your
Batman films…
Yeah, I kept looking at Michael Gough – he
always thought I was laughing at him, but I
wasn’t. I was just thinking, “You were in
Konga and Horrors Of The Black Museum,” all
these great old movies. These guys that
played the villains were always the nicest,
sweetest people. And usually people that
play heroes are complete jerks!
Is it true you spent the shoot throwing
blood at Johnny Depp?
I had a big hypodermic needle, which I
sometimes squirted. Or [I flicked him] with
paintbrushes. You spend so much time
talking to people, sometimes it’s nice to get
in there and fool around.
It was another return to London, after
Batman. What drew you to the place?
When I first came here in the late ’80s to
work, I felt very much at home strangely. I
didn’t really know it. It did feel really weird,
like I’d been here before. There was
something about the culture and the people
that I just really liked. So, yeah, it surprised
me because I wasn’t expecting it. And then I
moved and lived here on and off for several
projects, and decided to make it permanent.
How much did parenthood change you?
Did it affect your project choices?
I’d say, for me, yes. Ten years ago, it
wouldn’t have been as present as it is now.
As I get older, and go through a bit more life
experience, all of a sudden it gives you that
sense of danger, tragedy or anger. You go
through your whole life and people call you
weird, and then you go through that, and it’s
the weirdest thing that can happen to
anybody. It’s an incredible experience.
GETTING
Working
again
A word about Johnny Depp. Can you say
why you have such a special connection?
It’s enjoyable working with him. I like actors
that like to become characters. Some actors
make a career out of being themselves in a
movie. But I’ve always enjoyed those real
character actors that just like to become
different creatures, and he’s that way. In
Scissorhands, he didn’t speak. On Ed Wood,
he didn’t shut up! On Sweeney Todd, he
sings. He’s always trying something
different on every movie.
Is he one of the most versatile actors
around?
He can do almost anything. I’ve seen it. It’s
just a process, really. I remember on
Scissorhands, same thing. In your heart,
simply he’s the guy and everybody knows it.
But the thing that always amazes me about
Hollywood, they see somebody do one thing
and that’s the one thing they think they do.
So somebody like him, who really does
change, I think it makes people
uncomfortable. They don’t quite know
what he’s going to do. I’ve had that same
thing for myself.
Some have compared your work to
Terry Gilliam. Do you feel he’s like
a brother of sorts?
No, I don’t have any brothers or sisters! I
never try to connect myself with anybody.
I try to treat everybody as an individual.
The more of that, the better. Again, in
Hollywood, people try to lump things
together. And unfortunately, they
don’t nurture individuality as much
as they should. CF
THE 1990S | CLASSIC FILM
 1990s

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1990S


American
Beauty
How did an English first-time director make one of
the most beautiful American films of the ’90s? Sam
Mendes, Kevin Spacey and co revisit the ’burbs…
WORDSMATTMUELLER

AMERICAN DREAMS
ALAN BALL (screenwriter) I started writing it as a play but the
idea always rattled around in my brain as a movie. There were
several inspirations. I was fascinated by the [Long Island Lolita]
Amy Fisher trial. I felt like the real story underneath the media
hype was way more fascinating and tragic than what we could
see. In the first draft of American Beauty, there’s a big media trial
in which Ricky and Jane are being tried for Lester’s murder. I also
had an encounter with a plastic bag one day in front of the World
Trade Center and I’ve had many jobs that I detested. A lot of
Lester’s story came from direct personal experience.
DAN JINKS (producer) It was the best screenplay that either one
of us had ever read. It was incredibly funny on one hand, yet
quite moving on the other.
BRUCE COHEN (producer) Dan and I looked at each other and
said, “Wow, I wonder if there will be studios brave enough to buy
this.” Spielberg read the script on a Saturday night and on
Monday morning, he said, “The script’s great, make it right
away, don’t change a thing.”
JINKS A couple of things led us to Sam. We went to see his
production of Cabaret in New York and it was so unique and
AMERICAN BEAUTY
CLASSIC
MOVIE
distinctive. He directed this stage musical like it was a movie.
STEVEN SPIELBERG (DreamWorks co-founder) The script
was very, very compelling but when Sam got hold of it, he took
it to a whole other level.
SAM MENDES (director) American Beauty was unlike anything I
had ever read before and you can’t say that about many scripts.
I had a pitch all prepared, about how the movie is about
imprisonment and escape, and it’s a journey of redemption, and
it should be Kevin Spacey and Annette Bening. They bought what
I was saying about the movie, but they wanted John Travolta or
Bruce Willis, and they weren’t sure about Annette either.
KEVIN SPACEY (Lester Burnham) I knew Sam had turned down a
bunch of movies before he accepted American Beauty so I was very
curious what he held out for. We had our first meeting at the Old
Vic bar and I knew within 35 seconds that we were absolutely on
the same page.
CHRIS COOPER (Frank Fitts) At first, I thought, “God, do I want
to spend so much time in this character’s head?” I started
making excuses… I said, “This is such a negative script.” Finally,
my wife told me I was frightened of this script and chances are
because you’re frightened, that’s the reason you should do this
part. I knew immediately that she was right.
THE 1990S | CLASSIC FILM
 STEALING BEAUTY
SPACEY Sam used the best devices in theatre to prepare us to get
in front of those cameras. There was a two-week rehearsal period
where we really got to examine and explore and test and try; in

most movies you don’t get that kind of luxury. You’re lucky if you
show up and rehearse in the morning before you start shooting.
WES BENTLEY (Ricky Fitts) Sam had to fight for those two weeks
of rehearsals and what he got out of it was so strong in terms of
a cast ensemble feeling.
SPACEY Sam and I always talked about the journey that Lester
was on and how to map it out so that you never actually saw him
change. There was never a moment where he suddenly changed;
he evolved. That process with Sam was incredible because he just
had this ability to shave things off. He was always trying to get
the performance that he needed in the editing.
BENTLEY Sam’s first concern was having a foundation for
this movie – he knew how big a commentary on US society it
was. A lot of people were surprised that he had such a great
take on American suburban issues. I think that’s the only way
that this story could have been told is by someone with an
outside perspective.
THORN IN THE SIDE
SPACEY I had no doubt in Sam. There was no moment where
I thought, “Sam can’t do this.”
MENDES The first few days I shot were not very good. In fact, I’d
go so far as to say it was crap. But it got better. And the studio was
good enough to let me reshoot the first couple of days.
SPIELBERG The first few days were very scary. I was looking at
Sam’s footage, and I knew it wasn’t going to cut together. I asked
him to come over to my house, and we reviewed the footage
together. In the end, he reshot the first three days, and from then
on, he was perfect.
BENTLEY A lot of movie sets, they’re parties – it’s a party set or
it’s a boring set or it’s a tense set. This one had no labels to it.
There are no clever stories to be told or pranks being played
because everyone was just focused. We shot a 24-hour day once
and even in that full 24-hour turn there wasn’t one strange thing
about the set – everyone was still so focused. I knew then that
this was going to be special.
THORA BIRCH (Jane Burnham) In lots of other films, I always
say, “Kids don’t really talk like that.” But in this one, I was like,
“No, I talk just like that. And it’s sad.”
MENDES We barely were able to shoot the scene where Annette
wakes up to Kevin wanking. Annette could not stop laughing –

Close up Plotlucklastminutechanges…
Fewmoviesundergothe
drasticretoolingthatSam
Mendesappliedmere
weeksbeforeAmerican
Beautywasdueforrelease
TheBritishstagetyroshot
AlanBall’sscriptalmostwordforword 
includingaprologuewiththedeadLester
BurnhamflyingdownfromheavenFalsely
accusedteenageloversRickyWesBentley
andJaneThoraBirchwerealsoshownlosing
theirtrialforhishomicide asRicky’sfather
FrankChrisCooperframesthemwiththe
videoinwhichJanegabsaboutwantingher
fatherdeadButinabold visionarymove 
Mendesslicedouttheentiresubplot–creating
aclassicinonefellswoop
Noteveryoneembracedtheradical
alterations“Ifeltlikesomebodyhadtaken
a swordanddrawnitthroughmygut ”said
Beauty’slatecinematographerConradHall
picturedleftonfirstviewing beforethe
directorwonhimoverAsforBall healso
pleadedwithMendestoreinstatethe
courtroomsequencesbeforecominground
“I thinkwhenIwrotethosescenes Iwasreally
angryandthatcameoutonthepage ”saidBall
“Butthatsubplotjustwasn’tnecessary”All
thatremainsaretheflyingshotsoversuburbia 
whichMendesleftinasarunningmotif
the sound that Kevin’s hand was making under the covers was
too much for her. I also asked Kevin to find three different ways
of describing wanking for every take, which of course made it
even funnier for her.
SPACEY I said a whole string of different ones: peeling the
carrot, milking the lizard, whatever. On Annette’s last day, we
strung them all together and made a video for her. [laughs]
MENDES Originally it was a pool of water that Mena was in above
Kevin and then I turned it into a sea of roses, which was easier to
shoot. We first shot it on high-speed camera with real rose petals
being dropped from cranes and then we reversed the film. But
the camera broke and I watched the dailies – the film was already
damaged – and Mena was immobile. So thank god we were able
to shoot it again because what makes it so beautiful is her
motion. We were shooting six times slower than normal speed so
she had to flap her arms up and down like a demented butterfly.

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1990S

 AMERICAN BEAUTY
SQUAREMEAL BENTLEY Chris Cooper is extremely intense and very dedicated
Far left The to committing time to the characters. What we filmed was just a
Burnham clan fraction of the energy between Frank Fitts and his son. My friend
endures an Jake Gyllenhaal did a movie called October Sky in which Chris
uncomfortable
played his dad. I saw it right after I finished American Beauty and
dinner
there was one scene where Chris shows affection to Jake’s
PAYDIRT Left Sam character and I literally started crying. It wasn’t in a weird
Mendes’ view of Method actor, I’m-Ricky kind of way. I wasn’t abused as a child,
American suburban I have no idea what that feels like but I got something there so
life pulled in  
m sad, so fucking desperate that only Chris could have made that
Stateside happen in me. The sense of loss I felt, the sense of what I never
had, was so powerful that it just wiped me out. And that really
DEADWEIGHTS comes across in the film.
Below Lester‘s
flying return from
heaven in a bathrobe
was cut as the plot COME TOGETHER
shifted tone MENDES Alan had written a multilayered script with a spiritual
dimension. Then suddenly it turned into an episode of NYPD Blue.
I took out the whole courtroom framework, where the kids were
found guilty of Lester’s murder – about 15 minutes. I wanted to
let the loose ends dangle.
BALL I said it doesn’t really work and you should put that stuff
back in. Sam said, “I totally disagree, it’s not important,” and we
had words. The next day I saw it again with all of the ending
removed, and it really worked. That other stuff worked on the
page but not really on screen, because the movie that evolved was
one that for all its darkness had a really romantic heart. It was
hopeful and optimistic. And for those kids to go to jail for a crime
they didn’t commit, especially after seeing the heartbreaking
performances of Wes and Thora, it was too cynical.



‘I thought I was
making a whimsical,
comic story – like a
Coen brothers film’
Sam Mendes
MENDES The movie you see is not the movie I thought I was
shooting. I thought I was making a much more whimsical, comic
story, kaleidoscopic, almost like a Coen brothers movie. And
what I found in the cutting room was a much more emotional,
haunting animal than I had imagined.
SPACEY I don’t think I’ve cried so long and hard as when I saw
the movie for the first time. And that scene with the plastic
bag, to me, was everything the movie was about: “Don’t miss
that moment of your life.” That scene just kills me. I hear
Sam talk about how difficult it was to film. He was screaming
at a plastic bag at six in the morning in a parking lot going,
“Fucking move.” It’s hilarious, but to me that’s what
cinema can do.
MENDES I still count as the best moment of the whole
process the moment that I first showed it to Steven. He likes
to watch movies alone and so I was pacing up and down and
finally I got word: “Steven’s finished.” I went in and he stood
up and he had tears in his eyes and he said, “You’ve made a
classic movie.”
SPIELBERG It wasn’t really the film I expected. I didn’t expect
as much raw truth and I also didn’t expect as much humour…
What Sam brought was a tremendous insight into the human
condition.
ANNETTE BENING (Carolyn Burnham) When we went to see the
picture in this little screening room, I went with my husband

THE 1990S | CLASSIC FILM

 CLASSIC FILM

[Warren Beatty], and when the movie ended, I just was like,
“Oh my god, it works. It works. It works!” Just that feeling of…
“Yeeeessss!”
SPACEY Ultimately, you can’t imagine that a film will be as
successful as this one was – that’s the stuff you can’t possibly
ever know. I’ve done good films that didn’t make money, so
people call them failures but I think they’re huge successes. I
think we measure things too much on how much money a movie
BUDDYINGUP
Above Bentley and BEAUTY’S SPOT
makes. The film world is littered with movies that are hugely Cooper spent a long MENDES That was lightning in a bottle. To recreate the reasons
successful films but they may not have made a lot of money. time building their for the success of American Beauty would be impossible. If you
American Beauty was one of those that did both. characters make Bonnie And Clyde 10 years later, it’s not such a great movie.


JINKS We realised very early on that kids were loving the movie But where it sits – in 1967 – it’s a cultural milestone. In my year,
HAPPYMEAL
and completely got the themes. We were like, “Finally, here’s I thought Election was a great movie, and it didn’t take off. That
Above left Lester
a movie that has both generations in it in a really intelligent, could have been the fate of American Beauty.
finds joy in a menial
thoughtful way, and people are responding to that.” fast-food job BENTLEY [Smiling] I am proud of the film. It’s played such a big
SPACEY Winning the Oscar was the pinnacle of a remarkable part in my life. I still get work off of that role and at the end of the
journey on that particular movie and, for me, the pinnacle of a day I’m thankful but I don’t think people fully realise the impact
12-year focus on trying to carve a film career out. It was pretty of it. When something like that happens to you, there’s a lot of
much right after that that I asked myself, “It’s gone better than baggage that comes along with it.
I could have hoped – what am I supposed to do now?” I mean SPACEY All I know is that people still talk about it, people still
what do you do with that? Do you just keep making movies, refer to it, I still get letters about it and it’s a film that people still
making money, trying to be on top? I thought, “No, I don’t want think of with great affection.
that any more, I want something else.” MENDES Movies live and breathe and walk among us. I didn’t
MENDES For two or three weeks after you win the Oscar, you truly realise that until I made American Beauty. Theatre lives in
learn what your name sounds like in consonants, when someone the memory, which can be very powerful, but it is not the same.
who recognises you whispers, “Sm Mnds”. But then it goes. You A movie puts you in the centre of the culture. And that’s the
become invisible again. challenge – the game. You are playing for immortality. CF

What happened next

American Sam Mendes Kevin Spacey Playing Gay Yoof Club

Nightmare As Mendes admits American Winning his second Oscar sealed It’s not easy being gay for Wes Bentley Thora Birch and Mena
While the movie stands Beauty was “lightning in a bottle” the title of “Actor Of His Chris Cooper’s super-repressed Suvari were outstanding in Beauty
firmly against the stifling and he’s struggled since to make Generation” for Spacey but ex-Marine who conceals his but it’s a dog-eat-dog world for
conformity demanded by such a bold cinematic statement post-Beauty his heart wasn’t in it true feelings under rampant young stars and all have suffered
America’s consumerist society RoadToPerdition and Jarhead are and he decamped to London for homophobia Brokeback mixed fortunes since While
our own high streets have both fine – but nothing more his first love – theatre – and a Mountain moulded its gay Bentley has recovered from his
been overrun by Gaps He did go on to direct the
-year stint as head of the characters in a similarly well-publicised drugs issues
Starbucks and the rest since highest-grossing Bond film Old Vic Since 
 though he’s tortured vein without the recent low-key outings for Birch
A L L S TA R

 Support your Skyfall though follow-up won several awards starring in phobia – but made them the and Suvari don’t bode well for
independents people! SPECTRE didn’t go down as well the HouseOfCards TV series leads in their story their long-term prospects

CLASSIC FILM | THE 1990S

ISSUE 3 ON SALE NOW


CLASSIC FILM | THE 2000S

 2000s

FROM HARRY POTTER TO EXTREME

HORROR, VIA GROSS-OUT COMEDY
AND A NEW KIND OF ACTION MOVIE
WORDSJORDANFARLEY

THE 2000S | CLASSIC FILM

 

10  
1 THEDARKKNIGHT
Films That
Defined A Decade
Stillthebestsuperheromovieevermade ChristopherNolan’sBat
sequelnotonlyusheredintheeraofdarkandgrittycomicbookmovies 
butfeaturesoneoftheall-time-greatvillainsinHeathLedger’sJoker

2  
2 DONNIEDARKO
RichardKelly’sambitiousindiesci-fiwasthekindofcultsmash
thatonlycomesalongonceadecade andwasproofthatultra-weird
works albeitinsmalldoses

 
3 THELORDOFTHERINGS-

Stillagargantuanachievement Jackson’sdefinitiveRingstrilogy
capturedtheappetiteforfantasticalescapism andsimplegoodvsevil
stories whilealsobeinganear-perfectTolkienadaptation

 
4 GLADIATOR
BrieflyinspiringawaveofswordandsandalfilmsTroy  
Gladiatormadeamega-staroutofRussellCroweandputRidleyScott
backonthemap

 
5 FINDINGNEMO

Pixarledthewaywhenitcametoanimationinthenoughties and
FindingNemowastheirbiggesthit thanksinnosmallparttothefilm’s
3 sensationalunderwatervisuals

CLASSIC FILM | THE 2000S


T
he history of cinema is one of technological advance, from
talkies to colour film to widescreen projection and surround
sound, and the noughties were no different. Computer
generated imagery had been in its infancy since the ’80s but
it was the ’00s that saw CGI become an integral part of a
filmmaker’s toolkit, used for everything from invisible set
enhancements in Cast Away to the building of fully artificial,
photo-real alien worlds in Avatar.
The biggest breakthroughs came at the start of the
decade, with Peter Jackson’s celebrated Lord Of The Rings
trilogy. Where previously filmmakers had reached for the
sun only for their wings to melt (see 1998’s Lost In Space or
even the Star Wars Special Editions for how horribly it can go
wrong), Jackson understood both the opportunities that CGI
provided, and its limitations. Throughout the trilogy, the
1 combination of massive miniatures (or “bigatures”) with
CGI resulted in the creation of the most convincing fantasy
world ever seen on screen. While motion capture, or
“performance” capture, became a viable technique thanks to
the pioneering work of WETA and Andy Serkis in the creation
of Gollum, just two years after Jar Jar Binks had filmgoers
furious at what CGI had wrought.
Computers were also at the forefront of another major
shift, one that began in the ’90s, but reached its zenith in
the noughties – the move from hand-drawn 2D animation
to computer generated 3D by American animation studios
such as Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks. It was Pixar who
proved it could be done, to breathtaking effect with Toy Story
in 1995. It took the rest of the animation houses half a
4 Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, The Last House On
2000s
5
decade simply to catch up. Shrek proved a huge hit for
Dreamworks, but it was Pixar who dominated the ’00s with
one of the hottest filmmaking hot-streaks in cinema history,
from Monsters, Inc. to Up, not a single dud in the bunch. Up
capped the decade off with a Best Picture Oscar nomination
– only the second animated film to do so following Beauty
And The Beast in 1991.
CGI was also a crucial factor in the explosion of comic
book and superhero movies in the noughties. Starting with
Bryan Singer’s X-Men, filmmakers now had the means to
convincingly realise the impossible abilities and powers that

separate the supermen from the boys. This technological
event horizon coincided with the coming of age of
filmmakers who grew up reading comics, such as Sam Raimi,
who shepherded childhood favourite Spider-Man to colossal
critical and commercial acclaim. Over at DC, Christopher
Nolan rebooted Batman with a trilogy of films that
resurrected the Dark Knight in the wake of Joel Schumacher’s
disastrous ’90s efforts, while the Marvel Cinematic Universe
kicked off in earnest with Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk in
2008. With ultra-stylised comic book adaptations 300 and
Lbgy<bmr, directors such as Zack Snyder and Robert Rodriguez
also proved that “comic book movie” didn’t always have to
mean “superhero movie” or even “kid’s movie”.
t the opposite end of the budget spectrum,
A young filmmakers were getting their hands
dirty (in most cases, literally) with low budget
horrors that offered ample freedom with little
risk, but potentially huge rewards. James Wan’s Saw (2004) is
often credited with the birth of the “torture porn” genre, but
is a much smarter, and finely crafted horror than most give it
credit for. What’s undeniable is its legacy – not just six
sequels, but a wave of films designed to elicit shock and
scares from the extremity of their bloodshed, including
Hostel, The Devil’s Rejects, Wolf Creek, The Collector and more.
This in turn led to the New French Extremity, best
exemplified by Pascal Laugier’s transcendentally brutal
Martyrs and Xavier Gens’s Frontier(s). By the end of the
decade the appetite for extreme violence had largely been
replaced with nostalgia, with studios seemingly hellbent on
remaking every ’70s and ’80s horror movie going, not
limited to Dawn Of The Dead, Halloween, Friday The 13th, The
THE 2000S | CLASSIC FILM
 CLASSIC DECADE
The Left and Black Christmas. The decade closed with a glimpse
of horror’s future as Paranormal Activity went from micro-
budget home movie to one of the most profitable motion
pictures of all time, a template producer Jason Blum has
repeated with great success ever since.
Comedy meanwhile was also pushing boundaries, but
with gross-out laughs rather than shock and gore. Hot on
the heels of American Pie, Road Trip, Scary Movie and Superbad
took teen depravity to its bodily-fluid covered extremes.
But this was nothing compared to the adults behaving badly
in the likes of Step Brothers, Wedding Crashers and The
Hangover. Judd Apatow was undoubtedly the most influential
voice of the decade. His features – The 40-Year-Old Virgin
and Dgh\d^]yNi– set a stoner comedy template that many
imitated, but never mastered. The Brits also kept their end
up with Shaun Of The Dead proving an instant horror
comedy favourite on both sides of the Atlantic, while Sacha
Baron Cohen took America by storm with his satirical
mockumentary Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For
FZd^y;^g^_bm@ehkbhnlGZmbhgH_yDZsZdalmZg.

ocumentary cinema also went through a

D renaissance in the early noughties with Super

Lbs^F^, An Inconvenient Truth, The March Of The
Penguins,@kbsserFZg and more proving surprise
hits at the box office and, in some cases, having a major
impact on the real world. It was Michael Moore, however, 7
who proved the decade’s undisputed documentary superstar.
The outspoken filmmaker’s investigation into gun violence,


Bowling For Columbine, was the first documentary to compete
in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 46 years,
while George W. Bush polemic Fahrenheit 9/11 became the
10 Films That Defined
first documentary ever to win Cannes’ top prize – the
Palme d’Or – and the first documentary to cross the
$100 million mark at the box office. Though it couldn’t
A Decade cont...
prevent Bush’s re-election in 2004.
Real world events were also being filtered through  
6 CROUCHINGTIGERHIDDENDRAGON
TheMatrixhadignitedapassionformartialartsinAmerican
audiences andCrouchingTigerwasperfectlyplacedtocapitalise 
cinema in other ways. The destruction of the Twin Towers
provingasurprisehitonreleasedespitebeingsubtitled
on 11th September, 2001 had a major impact on American
filmmakers. War movies fell out of favour for much of the
decade, as did action movies depicting terrorism. Spike
Lee was one of the first filmmakers to address the
 
7 AVATAR
LikeTitanic manyexpectedJamesCamerontomakehisfirst
greatfollywithAvatarHequicklyprovedcriticswrongwith
groundbreakingtechbreakthroughsandstaggeringboxofficesuccess
aftermath of the devastating attacks indirectly in The
+.mayAhnk – a post-9/11 examination of racial intolerance
in New York. It would take five years for a mainstream
American movie to depict the events of 9/11 onscreen. First
 
8 SHAUNOFTHEDEAD
EdgarWright’shomagetothehorrormoviesofhisyouthwas
a breathoffreshairamidtheApatow-productionsdominatingAmerican
came Paul Greengrass’s intense and upsetting United 93, comedy andinimitablybrillianttoboot
swiftly followed by Oliver Stone’s sentimental but
heartfelt Phke]yMkZ]^<^gm^k. Both were only modest  
9 THEREWILLBEBLOOD
PaulThomasAnderson’staleofasuccess-obsessedoiltycoon
boastsnotonlyoneofthedecadesbestperformances butasoundtrack
thathasinfluencedcomposerseversince
8

 
10 THEBOURNEULTIMATUM
Thequintessentialnoughtiesactionmovie Ultimatumperfectly
encapsulatestheseries’trailblazingactionandrealworldsmartsEvery
Americanactionmoviehasexistedinitsshadowsince

6 9

CLASSIC FILM | THE 2000S

AVATAR
REMAINS ON
2000s
THE CUTTING successes at the box office. Escapism, understandably, was
the order of the decade.
EDGE OF Despite increasing suspicion and intolerance of outsiders,
foreign language cinema became more popular than ever in
TECHNOLOGY the noughties. Thanks in part to the proliferation and

TO THIS DAY accessibility of DVDs, the works of world cinema’s greatest

filmmakers were now simply a click away. At the multiplex
meanwhile, the likes of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,
Ma^yIZllbhgH_Ma^<akblm, Apocalypto, Hidden, Amélie, Downfall
and <bmrH_@h]all had significant crossover appeal for an
audience that would typically turn their nose up at subtitles.
The success of Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away also saw the
remaining films in the Japanimation powerhouse’s
beloved back catalogue dubbed into English for release in
America, many of which were overseen by Pixar’s head
honcho John Lasseter.

udiences, it seemed, were less and less

A interested in checking their brains at the door

– a fact most apparent with the success of the
Bourne series. Starting with The Bourne Identity,
the Matt Damon-fronted trilogy had smarts to match its
highly influential action, taking place in a recognisable world
shaped by global politics and the paranoia of contemporary
surveillance culture. There’s little question the action helped
too, particularly when Paul Greengrass took the reins of the
series, instilling Bourne with his signature shakycam style. So
impactful were the Bourne movies that the near 50-year-old
James Bond franchise was forced to reinvent itself to keep up
with the times. Out went Pierce Brosnan after the disastrous
Die Another Day, in came hard man with a heart of gold Daniel

Craig. Fan reaction was overwhelmingly negative to news of
his casting, but dissipated after the release of Casino Royale
– not only a wildly successful, Bourne-tinged reinvention of
the series but arguably the best Bond movie ever.
The only British movie franchise to rival Bond also took
flight in the noughties – Harry Potter. J.K. Rowling’s boy
wizard proved an instant smash hit on the big screen, despite
requiring a perplexing title-change in the States, and opened
the doors to a series of young adult literary adaptations later
in the decade – most notably Twilight, which briefly made
Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart more popular than
dogs on the London tube.
Finally, it was a year of several significant firsts at the
Oscars. In 2001 Halle Berry became the first black actress
ever to win a Golden Baldie (Best Actress, for Monster’s Ball),
while 2009’s The Hurt Locker saw Kathryn Bigelow beat her
ex-husband James Cameron to the Best Director Oscar,
making her the first woman ever to scoop the prize. In 2001
the Best Animated Feature Oscar was introduced (Shrek was
the first recipient). In 2003 The Lord Of The Rings: Return Of
Ma^yDbg` swept the board, winning 11 Oscars – a record
equalled only by Titanic and Ben-Hur. In 2005 Paul Haggis’s
10 Crash pulled off one the greatest Oscar upsets of all time by
beating Ang Lee’s superb Brokeback Mountain to the top prize.
In 2006 Scorsese was finally awarded a long overdue Best
Director Oscar for The Departed. And in 2008 Slumdog
Millionaire captured the cultural zeitgeist, chiming with a new
era of tolerance in the wake of Barack Obama’s election.
Capping off the decade in style was James Cameron, who
didn’t just put the cherry on the tech-powered noughties
with Avatar, a film that remains on the cutting edge of
technology to this day, but made the highest grossing film of
all time. Even Star Wars: The Force Awakens fell half a billion
short, and that’s with the help of inflation. Decades in
cinema don’t get much bigger. CF

THE 2000S | CLASSIC FILM

 2000s
SAMUEL L.
JACKSON
STAR WARS, DIE HARD AND JURASSIC PARK ARE
ONE HELL OF A CV. WE ASK SAMUEL L. JACKSON
HOW HE COPED WITH ALL THAT GREENSCREEN
amuel L. Jackson is a busy
S
man. He’s pacing around
his management’s offices
in west Los Angeles – one
of those deconstructed
contemporary buildings

you don’t know whether to admire or to
help finish – and he’s got a cell phone
clamped to his ear while juggling
interviews, business and the need to pee.
His assistant wants to talk to him
about the flights he’s booking to London,
while his manager is trying to get him to
a meeting in Santa Monica. It’s 2008 and
it’s clearly a stressful morning, but not
enough to rattle the coolest man in
Hollywood, dressed today in what can only
be described as golf casual – golf has
become a passion second only to
filmmaking for the actor – with a familiar
white Kangol hat cast at a rakish angle
completing the look.
“Hi, I’m Sam,” he says, giant palm
outstretched in a friendly greeting. Well of
course he is; the man has been making
top-drawer movies for more than four
decades, his face and voice as iconic as the
Statue of Liberty. As if being a part of Star
Wars, Pulp Fiction, The Incredibles, Kill Bill,
Die Hard With A Vengeance, Jurassic Park
and, oh, let’s say 80-plus other movies
wasn’t enough, he still has the workload
of a young punk still trying to make his
mark. And, of course, he’s one of the most
successful actors in movie history.
“Well, that’s a bit of a dubious
honour,” he smirks, settling down and
removing his round glasses to rub his
eyes. “I was fortunate enough to be in
GE T T Y
CLASSIC FILM | THE 2000S
WOR DS T ON Y HOR K INS
huge, huge movies; the volume of all the
other movies makes it up. But it just
means a lot of people have seen me in a
lot of different things and hopefully when
people stop me on the street to tell me
they enjoy my work, they mean it.”
Jackson says little kids are either Star
Wars or Incredibles fans, while adults like to
quote Pulp Fiction lines to him. “They
always say, ‘You know what they call a
quarter pounder with cheese in France?’
I go, ‘No what?’ because that’s what Jules
says in the movie. They go, ‘Come on!’
I say, ‘Oh, I thought you wanted to do the
scene with me.’”
Jackson has always had a lot of time for
his fans, often sneaking anonymously
onto blogs and discussion groups to hear
what people are thinking of him and his
movies – and occasionally throwing his
own opinions in there, too…
Is it true you also attend marketing
meetings for your films?
Yeah. I’m interested in how they perceive
the movie – what they think it is and how
they want to market it and who they want
to market it to. Sometimes we have
different ideas about what the movie is
about and who’s going to like it. I’m kind
of interested in how the people who are
paid to think that way think.
Are they ever right?
Sometimes they are. But I don’t think the
majority of them are real audience
members: they don’t actually go to dark
theatres and sit there and listen to people
react to the trailers. They may watch the
trailer online and talk about it among
themselves, but you don’t get a feel for that
stuff unless you’re in the midst of a whole
group of people they’re marketing to.
Do you sneak into your own movies
with the public?
Oh, all the time.
Ever get spotted?
Oh sure, yeah. I don’t go disguised or
anything. I just go sit at the back of the
theatre. The difference between a
premiere audience and a paying audience
is night and day.
In what way?
People who come to a premiere want to
fellate you in a certain kind of way. Your
name comes up on screen and they start
cheering and they laugh at everything. It’s
such a false gauge for what the movie’s
going to do. You’ve got to go and watch it
with real people.
But a lot of actors say that they don’t
really like seeing themselves on screen.
What?! You see, that’s a problem for me.
When actors say that I generally think
they’re lying because this business is kind
of narcissistic and if you don’t want to
watch it, why the hell would you expect
somebody to pay $10.50 to go and watch it?
Are you critical of your performances
when you go and watch your movies?
Nah, I’m critical of the director. It’s a
director’s medium. They go in, they cut it,
they do stuff to it… I’m like, “Hang on,
 
 CLASSIC STAR
I didn’t know that went together.” After my
first 20 or so films I found out that you can’t
let directors talk you into doing things three
different ways because then they can cut all
those different ways you did it together
– and sometimes they just don’t go together.
Do you have any favourites from your
back catalogue?
I like The Long Kiss Goodnight, Jackie Brown,
Pulp Fiction, 187, Changing Lanes, Red Violin…
I like those because they work. I even like
Unbreakable – I love that movie. I think it’s
Shyamalan’s best movie, actually.
How was Frank Miller as a first-time solo
director on The Spirit?
He was very open to suggestion and not
caught up in being Frank Miller the icon
comic guy. There was no, “Now I’m a
director so listen to me.” He didn’t walk
around with his hands like this [creates a
view square with his fingers] all the time.
The Spirit wasn’t your first effects-heavy
movie. Are you comfortable working with
greenscreen?
It doesn’t bother me. I’m an only child. I
read a lot, I spent a lot of time in my room
fighting things that weren’t there, so being

in that environment reminds me of that.
How did it compare to Star Wars?
The majority of what I was doing in The Spirit
I was doing with a person right there in front
of me. In Star Wars I’m fighting things that
aren’t actually there, so the more you can do
motion-wise with your lightsaber or in
movement, the more things they have to
draw around you so you look like you’re
really kicking ass.
You did act opposite Yoda, though...
Yoda was still a puppet then, so I rehearsed
CARD
role
in
DieHard
caught
of trouble…
attention When I left Atlanta being chased by the FBI
CLASSIC FILM | THE 2000S
with Frank Oz while they worked the ears
and the eyes and the mouth. Then they
brought all the lightsabers over and they
said, “Pick one”. I was hyperventilating.
The rest is history.
You sound very excited by the whole
process on Star Wars…
You only do so many films in your cinematic
career and you’re fortunate if you do three
films people remember, or that they treat as
“one of the greatest films of all time”. I’m
in Star Wars. People are going to be studying
the Star Wars films in film school forever.
They changed the way films are made. I was
fortunate enough to be in that and fortunate
enough to be in a little movie called Pulp
Fiction, which also changed the way movies
were made. It changed the way linear
storytelling was told and done, so that’s
another thing that will be studied forever.
In many ways Pulp Fiction did a lot to
change your career, too…
In a way. That and Die Hard. I was doing Die
Hard with Bruce when Pulp Fiction came out.
Die Hard came out right after that and it was
the highest grossing film worldwide. It
made me an international figure. Jungle
Fever started it when I got the best
supporting performance award at Cannes,
which they’d never given anybody. It got me
into Hollywood.
When you were making Pulp Fiction back
in the early ’90s, were you aware of its
potential impact?
No, of course not. You never know. Movies
are like crapshoots – you throw the dice and
hope seven comes up. But that movie in
particular, I remember reading it and saying
to myself, “OK, I like it,” and I had groups
of friends that I knew were going to love it.
But I had no idea that it had that crossover
CALLING
Jackson’s
WithAVengeance
Hollywood’s
THEY BROUGHT ALL
THE LIGHTSABERS
OVER AND SAID
‘PICK ONE’
appeal, that it would do what it did and make
people go, “Whoaah!” It was the same with
Die Hard. Bruce told me when we were
making it, “This movie is going to change
your life”.
You made a few movies after Pulp Fiction
that didn’t do so well, like Kiss Of Death,
The Great White Hype, Losing Isaiah… Did
you have any concerns about maintaining
a level of success?
I wasn’t trying to maintain anything – I was
just going to work. I choose a film or a script
comes across my desk, I read it, I like it and
there’s no plan. I do the film that’s ready to
go after the film I’m done with.
There must be some kind of
filtering process when you’re choosing
scripts though…
No there’s not. They come, I read them, I go,
“OK, I like this one,” and somebody will go,
“Well they’re not going to be ready until
whenever.” So whoever’s ready after the
film that I’ve accepted, that’s the film that
I do. There’s no plan in that – I just go to
work, like most people. I grew up in a house
where all the adults in the house went to
work every day. It ain’t like I got the worst
job in the world. I like getting up, hanging
out in my trailer, watching TV, going to work
for a couple of minutes, going back to my
trailer, eating some sandwiches… it’s not a
bad job. I would go to that job every day.
You mention your childhood: it was your
mother that sent you to LA to get you out
and run out of town I didn’t come here to
act. I came here and just hung out, then I
went back to school and got in the drama
department and started doing theatre.
So coming to live in Los Angeles didn’t
inspire you to make movies then?
No. This is how naïve I was: I used to think
when I was in the theatre in college that
once you got into the professional world, the
theatre was like the mail room. So I thought
I’d start out doing plays, then get that
middle-level management job which was
some job in TV doing a soap opera. And then
you become a movie star! I thought it was a
progression; it wasn’t until I started doing it
SAY
WHAT?
With
John
Travolta
in
’s
PulpFiction
for real that I realised, “Oh, it’s about being
in the right place at the right time.” So I did
Coming To America, then I’d go to New York
and do Law & Order like everyone else in New
York, then I’d go back to do some theatre.
What was the strangest job you did?
I was Bill Cosby’s stand-in on The Cosby Show
– I did that for a while. I just worked. It wasn’t
until I guess I lost sight of the whole movie
star thing, because… you know, all actors sit
at home thinking about the Academy
Awards and their acceptance speech, but I
was in New York and at a certain point I was
doing Pulitzer Prize-winning plays with
fantastic directors that were challenging me
in very specific ways. I was getting crafty and
hearing applause every night. I had lost sight
of all this. By the time Jungle Fever came
along and I had been in and out of rehab and
done all the research on that particular
thing, I was kind of ready to do this.
What helped with Jungle Fever more
– your theatre background or your
drug problems?
I actually didn’t have any drug problems
until the end of my drug life. I used drugs
successfully for 27 years, a long time.
Fortunately for me, even in the midst of all
the stuff I was doing, I was still able to hold
on to all the lessons and all the things that
people told me during that time – as I was
developing characters for stage and learning
how to break a script down.
So how did Morgan Freeman fit in?
When I first got to New York I used to watch
Morgan: I was his understudy a couple of
times in plays. Morgan is one of the first
people I’d ever seen on stage that made me
forget that I knew him. What he did on the
stage completely transformed him. That was
one of the things that made me realise this is
what I want to do and that’s how you’ve got
to do it – you’ve got to go into it seamlessly
and it’s got to be organic and so honest.
What was the best piece of advice that
Morgan gave you?
[Laughs] “Stay hungry”. He came to an
understudy rehearsal one day for a play and
he looked at me and said, “You’re really
good at this – so good that you don’t ever
have to worry about going on for me because
I’m never going to be sick”. That was the
best thing he could have ever said to me.
Of all the directors and actors you’ve
worked with over the years, who have
you got the most out of?
I’ve really gotten most from theatre
directors. The most interaction and nuance I
got from a film director was Roger Michell in
Changing Lanes – and he’s a theatre director
who just happens to be directing films. He’s
got such a great eye for what’s going on:
he’d come over and talk to me about what
I’d just done and say, “Why did you
emphasise that word?” I was like, “Oh no,
I’m back to the theatre, back to the notes!”

Most directors don’t worry about
dialogue?
Most film directors are just worried about
the shot, the composition, and they’re just
stuck in the monitor. Roger would stand by
the camera and watch the performance.
Frankenheimer did that [Against The Wall],
Friedkin did that [Rules Of Engagement]
– old-school guys do that, guys that learned
how to do it before there were monitors.
Young guys are stuck to the monitors.
How much have you seen things
change for African American actors
since you started?
They’ve changed totally. Just the fact that
writers and directors come from a world now
that is colour blind. All these kids go to school
together so kids who write stories now know
African Americans, they know Mexicans,
they know Asian Americans – people from all
over the world. When they write stories, the
stories are written from their experiences
and their experiences are all inclusive. So
now you don’t have to be the criminal if
you’re black: you can be the doctor, the
lawyer, even a president. I used to pick up a
script and go, “OK, what page do I die on?”
I always knew I was dying or going to jail.
You always seem to keep yourself busy.
Do you ever see yourself retiring?
Retiring from what? There’s no reason for
me to retire. I’m going to be the black
Michael Caine. CF
THE 2000S | CLASSIC FILM
 2000s
Eternal
ofthe s
spot
Break ups, crack ups: the demented minds of Michel Gondry
and Charlie Kaufman take the romcom into psychotic
territory in this Philip K. Dick-inspired sci-fi oddity.
It’s love Jim, but not as we know it…
WORDSJAMIERUSSELL
hy remember a destructive love affair?
W
Here at Lacuna we have perfected a safe,
effective technique for the focused
erasure of troubling memories.”
The internet never forgets. For
many years after Eternal Sunshine Of
Ma^yLihme^llFbg] hit cinemas, the promo
website for Lacuna Inc. (lacunainc.com), the fictional
company that offers its clients a very special kind of memory
erasure, stayed up and running. Tom Wilkinson’s avuncular
neuroscientist Dr. Howard Mierzwiak smiled out from the
home page, the jaunty elevator music played on a perpetual
loop, the upbeat testimonials (“Thank you. It works. It saved
my marriage”) promised wonders. If it was a real company,
it would probably be doing gangbuster, recession-proof
business even today.
Eternal Sunshine is a movie about memories. About what it
means to remember and what it costs to forget. Penned by
mindfuck master Charlie Kaufman, directed by hip French
pop video surrealist Michel Gondry and starring the unlikely
pairing of rubber-faced Jim Carrey and Brit luvvie Kate
Winslet, it’s one of the most original, bonkers and touching
CLASSIC FILM | THE 2000S
films of the 2000s – a muddled masterpiece of brain
bamboozling cinema. If Philip K. Dick had watched When
AZkkrF^mLZeer one too many times, he might have sketched
out the treatment for it in between writing =h:g]khb]l=k^Zf
h_>e^\mkb\La^^i8 and P^<ZgK^f^f[^kBm?hkRhnPahe^lZe^.
Kaufman loves Philip K. Dick. But Eternal Sunshine’s
memory-erasing conceit didn’t come directly from the
American sci-fi writer; he was just a prominent influence.
It was actually based on a remark that one of Gondry’s
buddies, the French conceptual artist Pierre Bismuth,
once made to a friend. Fed up of listening to her moaning
about her boyfriend, Bismuth asked her if she’d consider
erasing him from her memory – if such a thing was possible.
She said yes.
It set Bismuth thinking. What would it mean if you could
press a switch and wipe a person out of your mind? Inspired,
he designed little cards that read, “You have been erased from
someone’s memory” and sent them out to people as an art
project. When Gondry received one through his mailbox, he
knew there was a movie in it. “This simple idea instantly
opened up a can of ideas in my skull,” he remembers. “Then
I met Charlie and everything became more complicated…”
 ETERNAL SUNSHINE

unshine CLASSIC
MOVIE

less Mind


THE 2000S | CLASSIC FILM

 CLASSIC MOVIE
CLOSE UP Intoday’sCGIworld in-camera
effectsareconsideredoutof
fashion adatedthrowbackto
cinema’smechanicalpastNotif
you’reMichelGondry though“It’s
reallyhisforté ”saysMarkRuffalo
oftheFrenchman’spenchantfor
usingtrickslikeforced
perspectivetocreatehis
mind-boggling onscreenmemoryrecreations
“OneofthewaysMichelwantedtosuggestthis
visuallywasbycallingbacktoearlycinema where
magicianswereusinglive-actionpracticaleffectsto
changetimeandspace ”explainscinematographer
EllenKuras“Hedidn’twantthemtofeelorlook
completelyseamless”Withinminutesofshooting 
Kuraswasbeingaskedtousewheelchairsfordolly
shots shakethecameratoshowitwashandheldand
shootwithonlynaturallight
Gondry’soffbeatapproachtookitstollonthecast 
too“Hecomesinandasksyoutodothingsthatare
impossible ”saysCarrey“There’sascenewhereIcome
intoLacunainmymemory andI’mscreamingatthe
doctor andI’mintwodifferentplacesinthesceneIt’s
notsplitscreen–it’snotanyofthat–it’sMichelcoming
inandsaying‘You’regoingtorunaroundzecamera 
andyou’regoingtoputthehatonandtakeitoffand
putitonandtakeitoff!’So that’smegoingbackand
forthbehindthehandheldcamerainthedarkwitha
dresserdoingquickwardrobetweaksItwasabout
howquicklycanyourunthroughthedark getajacket
andahatonandcompletelychangeyourattitude
Iargued ‘Thiscan’tbedoneIcan’tdothisIt’s
impossible’Hesaid ‘Euh howdoyouknowifyoudon’t
try?’IwentbackintohistoricaltimestotheFrench
explorers‘Yes I’monboard MrCartier!’”

BLUE RUIN
Nobody writes like Charlie Kaufman. “Oh, my gosh,” says
Carrey. “It’s like Moses coming down from the mountain
with the tablets every time he has a script. All of Hollywood
goes, ‘It’s heeeere!’ He’s just so rock’n’roll, and at the same
time, he’s a complete intellectual.”
Eternal Sunshine sums up that contradiction nicely: its title
is cribbed from 18th century poet Alexander Pope (“How
happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!/The world forgetting, by
the world forgot./Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!/Each
pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d…”); meanwhile, its
migraine-inducing structure is destined to give screenwriting
guru Robert McKee panic attacks.
Brushing aside three-act conventions, Eternal Sunshine
begins where it ends, an encounter on the beach at Montauk,
outside New York, between ground-down everyman Joel
(Carrey) and kooky, blue-haired Clementine (Winslet).

As casting goes, it’s anti-expectation. Carrey reigns in his
usual shtick to do vulnerable and nerdy. Winslet flips into
overdrive as the wacky, sexy Clementine, a tomboy
maneater with permanent PMT. Neither star plays to type;
even putting them together flouts some unspoken law of he decides to have the procedure himself. “Does it cause
the universe. Why? “Because I’ve played Ophelia and he was brain damage?” he asks Lacuna’s brainiac Dr. Mierzwiak
Ace Ventura,” jokes Winslet. (Wilkinson). “Technically speaking, the procedure is brain
What happens between the bookends is what impacts, damage,” the doc explains benignly.
a falling in and out of love during which Clementine decides, Problem is, the erasure doesn’t quite work as well as it
on a whim, to have all memory of Joel surgically erased from should. Slacker lab technicians Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood
GIVEUSASMILE
Director Michel her brain using a pioneering new technique dreamt up by (the cackling Beavis and Butt-Head of neuroscience) botch
Gondry with Jim Lacuna Inc. When Joel next meets her, she literally blanks the brain wipe and Joel watches his memories of Clem
Carrey on set him. She has no memory of who he is. Furious and lovelorn, disintegrate as they’re zapped one by one. It’s possibly the
most surreal romcom ever made, a head trip mash-up of
avant-garde experimental film techniques that propels us
down Joel’s neural pathways as he watches his memories of
Clementine vanishing in reverse.
“Most of the movie takes place in his brain as she’s
being erased,” explains Kaufman, “and you see their whole
relationship, moment by moment, backwards from this
sort of bad end to the better beginning. Halfway through,
as the memories start getting better, he decides he
doesn’t want the procedure.” By then, though, it’s too late
and the movie’s breathtaking, bittersweet poignancy
comes from its recognition that we are who we are because
of our experiences.
Wiping the slate clean would cost us dearly, something
highlighted in the subplot where Lacuna receptionist and
walking Bartlett’s quote dispenser Mary (Kirsten Dunst)
realises she had an (erased) affair with her middle-aged
boss. “The good and bad things are what form us as
people,” says Winslet. “Change makes us grow. To have
one foot in the past, to hang on to the what ifs, to say if
I hadn’t done that or he hadn’t said this… all these things
are pointless.”

CLASSIC FILM | THE 2000S

 throughout the production to try to do the part rather than
DANGEROUS
MINDS Above
YELLOW FEVER try to be Jim Carrey.”
Rumour has it that Carrey, the elastic clown of =nf[ Carrey’s interest was immediately piqued by the material.
Mary Kirsten Dunst
and Dr Howard =nf[^k and Ma^FZld, wasn’t the first thought for Joel. “It wasn’t about memory; it was about being erased. It was
Mierzwiak Tom Nicolas Cage – star of Kaufman’s earlier twin screenwriter about how it would feel to be erased. That was the strongest

Wilkinson comedy :]ZimZmbhg – was mooted. In a perverse way it makes pull for me. That’s a heavy feeling. That’s what hit me with
the choice of Carrey even more apposite: Cage is a gangly the script. When he finds out that she’s erased him, it’s just
TOTALWIPEOUT actor with a decent funny bone; Carrey is a gangly comic with a brutal thing to anybody’s ego, but a male ego especially.
Left Joel’s precious an actor’s heart. But for Eternal Sunshine the role works better And I loved the idea that the memories went in reverse.
memories are erased with a clown’s tragicomic approach. There were so many things that made it different than your
one by one
Carrey is a revelation. Back in 2004, he was Hollywood’s normal losing your memory movie.” That it came just
third biggest box office star, breaking records with his $20m a couple of weeks after Adam Sandler’s .)?bklm=Zm^l kind
salary for Ma^<Z[e^@nr and pulling in hundreds of millions of proved the point.
in ticket sales for comedies like Liar Liar and ;kn\^:efb`amr. It takes two to tango, though, and Eternal Sunshine would
He waived his fee for Eternal Sunshine – just as well really, be nothing without Winslet’s sour Clementine. Their
since it would have doubled the entire production budget relationship, possibly one of the screen’s least movie-like
– and it’s obvious why. love affairs, brings with it the emotional connection
This is Carrey’s plum role, the one that’ll be on his that propelled the movie onto critics’ lists. Changing her
headstone. Eternal Sunshine gave him gravity, a serious role for mind as often as her hair colour, Clem is one of the
an unserious man. The star knew how lucky he was: “I had screen’s least idealised heroines; a brittle, real person
this guilty feeling of like, ‘How can I get this one and The (moody, scruffy, sometimes plain unlikeable) who just
MknfZgLahp?’ Two really interesting, original movies…” happens to be in a movie.
By all accounts, though, it wasn’t an easy transition. “I had to be prepared to let people dislike her at times
Kaufman was particularly nervous about the choice. “The because she’s a bit of a bitch,” says Winslet. “But at the same
first time I met him was the first rehearsal and he came in time, she’s gorgeous and funny and silly and you sort of feel
and he was wearing a hat very similar to [Joel’s] and he for her. You kind of sense her confusion about who she is
needed a shave. I had a real sigh of relief when I saw him and her life. She’s very, very vulnerable, I think, underneath
because I pictured this very rubber-faced, hair thing guy. But all of that stuff.”
he looked like a person, he looked really cool. Michel [Gondry]
and I said afterwards, ‘OK Jim wears no make-up and always
needs a shave in this movie.’ He agreed to that and I think it AGENT ORANGE
does a lot to humanise him. I think he was available Michel Gondry worked with Foo Fighters on “Everlong”. He
shot a promo for “The Hardest Button To Button” for The
White Stripes. And for Björk’s “Hyper-Ballad” – a song about
a woman battling to keep a relationship alive – he asked the
‘ IT WASN’T A FILM ABOUT MEMORY, Icelandic pixie to play dead and superimposed a singing
hologram on her face. It would be a pretty decent training
IT WAS ABOUT BEING ERASED’ ground for Eternal Sunshine. “It is not such a stretch moving

JIM CARREY from videos to narrative features,” the Frenchman says.

“I always saw my videos as little stories, anyway. In one, the

THE 2000S | CLASSIC FILM

 MELANCHOLIA story is a palindrome. In another, it is a spiral.” Gondry isn’t
Patrick Elijah Wood
ponders matters of
the first pop promo helmer to segue into features – see also
Fincher, Jonze, Glazer and, er, McG – but he can claim to be
‘I PICTURED JIM CARREY
the mind alongside
Joel Jim Carrey
the artiest.
Few films are unique. Most are familiar. Eternal Sunshine is
AS THIS RUBBER-FACED
a movie that is both at once. If you wanted to you could build GUY, BUT HE WAS COOL’
CHARLIE KAUFMAN

a through-line between its amnesiac approach and films as
bizarrely diverse as F^f^gmh, .)?bklm=Zm^l, IZr\a^\d and
true-life doc NgdghpgPabm^FZe^(Kaufman, who pitched
Eternal Sunshine before F^f^gmh was even conceived, had a
panic attack when Nolan’s film arrived first: “I freaked out moments we’ve all had when the world no longer works the
when F^f^gmh opened”). But it’s also unlike any of those way it should. Joel running from one end of a street to the
movies – its bold visual style isn’t simply an editing room other, only to find he’s where he started is something we
trick like F^f^gmh’s breathtaking panache, but something can all relate to, the stuff of nightmares. Best of all is
deeper, more resonant. Kaufman’s structure, a Möbius strip of trippy déjà vu that
Its artificial staging has all the fractured logic of a twists and turns. It’s the surreal deal, a movie that
dreamscape, Buñuel meets Brecht. Its influences stretch far discovers in Gondry’s direction a perfect index for the
and wide: the blurred, molten wax faces of characters as fractured lacunae of Kaufman’s script.
they drop out of Joel’s memory look like something from It shows in Joel’s gradual memory erasure as trick shots
a Chris Cunningham video. Elijah Wood’s impossible to turn and trompe-l’oeil staging turn his onscreen memories into
around back becomes one of those anxious, Freudian dream wacky journeys through the cerebral cortex. In one scene Joel
appears as an adult baby hiding under a table in his PJs while
Clem – dressed in a ’70s dress and knee-high white boots,
flashes him her crotch to try and keep his adult self with her
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT (his response: “Eugh!”).
Finally, there’s the sequence where Carrey crawls under a
French toast Carry on Carrey duvet, begging not to lose everything (“Please let me keep
After EternalSunshine Gondry The rubber-faced clown returned to this memory”) as his synapses are zapped. In that moment,
stamped his quirky sensibility on gurning in FunWithDickAndJane
the film’s melancholy theme of loss goes beyond the script’s
filmgoers with music doc Dave pretty unfunny and gay prison
Chappelle’sBlockParty whimsical love comedy ILoveYouPhillipMorris romcom set-up. It resonates with existential panic. It’s as
story TheScienceOfSleepand VHS comedy Be Facebook group “Jim Carrey Should Make More though Gondry has got inside our heads, strewn recognisable
KindRewind as well as the disappointing masked Films Like EternalSunshine” is now down to just fears and experiences out for all to see; making us question
crime fighter movie TheGreenHornetin 
 one member… Pity our own memories, feelings and moments. And ultimately,
leaving the heart-bruising ending open to interpretation.
Oscar countdown Synec-what? Where do Joel and Clem go from here?
EternalSunshine won Best Original Kaufman finally got behind the No one, not even Spike Jonze, has translated the scribe’s
Screenplay in 

 where Kaufman camera for mind-screw Synecdoche 

eccentricities onto the screen so brilliantly. It’s dementia
was hilariously troubled by the NewYork – a movie that had critics
autocue countdown meant to keep everywhere reaching for their cinema, a headfuck that stays with you. It’s also one of the
K OB A L , A L L S TA R

acceptance speeches brief “Thanks to the dictionaries All the world’s a stage as this surreal finest movies of the 21st century. If it wasn’t an insult to its
Academy  seconds  seconds That’s really theatrical noodle deals with life death art and smarts, we’d say it was unforgettable. Instead we’ll just have
intimidating I’ll try to look somewhere else… everything in between to call it one of the last movies we’d ever want to forget. CF

CLASSIC FILM | THE 2000S

 THE WORLD’S NUMBER ONE
SCI-FI AND FANTASY MAGAZINE

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 CLASSIC INTERVIEWS

The Best of the

TOTAL FILM
INTERVIEW
14 EXTRACTS FROM OUR FAVOURITE
INTERVIEWS FROM THE LIFE OF
TOTAL FILM
KEVIN SMITH
DECEMBER 1997
ROBERT REDFORD
SEPTEMBER 1998 FOR THE HORSE WHISPERER
FOR CHASING AMY

You’ve created this world which runs parallel to
Your films all take characters Hollywood, and only intersects it when it’s vital…
who are in slacker limbo I think that’s part of who I am. I’m sure there are many
between college and getting a contradictory parts to myself. I wanted to put something
career. As you get older, isn’t it back into the industry since almost 20 years ago, when I’d
going to be harder to maintain had a long decade involving a lot of work. I was just 40 and
that post college years thing? I’d just directed my first film. I thought: “I think it’s time
Hopefully, the older I get, the to stop”. So that led to Sundance. I considered: “It’s been a
more I’ll want to talk about good decade for me. Why not put something back, and put
what’s interesting me at that time. Stuff like this – if I’m still some energy into that?”
doing it when I’m 40 – shoot me. If all of this stuff is still
going on in my life then, definitely – kill me. You’ve played a lot of heroic roles, wouldn’t you like to play a villain?
Well, I have played villains. I started as an actor in New York, in the theatre and on
Are there any films you think you couldn’t make? television. All the roles that I played on television were killers, rapists, psychos…
Any blockbuster. I don’t think I have the talent or ability to deranged. Just take my word for it: there was some pretty savage stuff. They were the
make a Face/Off. Or even the patience. Ben Affleck, he’s best parts to play. Violence is quite easy to do on screen.
working on Armageddon. He said they’d shot for two
weeks, and not done a word of dialogue yet, just running You’ve been very successful with your career. Do you feel that you’ve been equally
around in front of greenscreens and stuff. successful juggling your work with your family during all these years? How have
you been able to do it?
So the bottom line is that you’re a writer/director? By putting time into it. And by making it important to me, making it a priority. There
Well, I write for hire, but I would never be a director for have been many times when I would stop work and just go spend time with my family.
hire. Some really tempting offers have come down, and You have to really commit to it, and I still do.
it’s sometimes hard to say no, because there’s a lot of
money involved. It’s like somebody said, “Hey man, here’s
$10m, will you suck a dick?” You’d certainly have to give it
some thought before you said no. And if somebody says
“Here’s two million dollars, you want to direct an Eddie
ALL THE ROLES THAT I PLAYED
Murphy movie?” I give it a thought and then I say no. ON TV WERE KILLERS, RAPISTS,
There’s a fair degree of jealousy in all of your films.
PSYCHOS… DERANGED. THERE
One would imagine it has to be out of my system by now. WAS SOME PRETTY SAVAGE STUFF
If it’s not, then I feel sorry for me.
REX

CLASSIC FILM | THE TF INTERVIEW

 INTERVIEWS

SEAN
CONNERY
JUNE 1999 FOR PLAYING
BY HEART

When you made the first Bond film

– =k'yGh, back in 1962 – how did you see
your career progressing?
I didn’t have anything resembling a great
game plan. Everybody claimed they knew
that the James Bond films were going to be
a successful series – it’s just not true. If you
had asked me when I was 28, I definitely
wouldn’t have imagined I’d still be acting
at 68. I’ve never been one for long-term
planning. As for looking to the future, I
always wanted to be an old man with a
good face, like Hitchcock or Picasso.

Shall we get The Avengers out of the way?

Well, from the beginning, I always tried to
have humour in any film I do. I thought there
was quite a bit of humour in The Avengers,
and I had a bit of fun – until they put the film
together. And if ever there was a licence to
kill, I would have used it to kill the director
and the producer.

Would you ever consider playing

Bond again?
There is talk about this at the moment, but
I’m not initiating it. There’s no way I would
be playing James Bond again – it’s finished
for me. If there was an offer, of course I
would entertain it like any other offer.
I doubt if they could afford me, but I’d
be willing to listen.

THE TF INTERVIEW | CLASSIC FILM

 SANDRA
BULLOCK
JUNE 2000 FOR 28 DAYS
Do you feel like a movie star?
A lousy one. I tell you, I’m a horrible celebrity. I should not be a
celebrity. You should have to take a test and I would have failed.

Why?
I just think there is some quality that you should have to be a
good celebrity. People expect certain things, like at premieres.
Every time I have to go to an event I have a complete meltdown.
I spend hours thinking about what to wear and it’s never the
right thing. I never look great.

But aren’t you meant to be a sex symbol?

I was never considered the attractive girl in films. I was always
cast as the goof. If you look at While You Were Sleeping, it was
sweet and I was the girl next door, but I wasn’t the hottie… You
get into this business and they can groom you to be a sex symbol:
photography, hair extensions, lip gloss. To me, what makes
somebody a sex symbol is putting them up on a screen. I think
the attraction is the success. Success can make a sex symbol out
of anybody, and that’s not the real thing.

Is that why you’re doing Fbll<hg`^gbZebmr next?

I get to have the monobrow, the hair on the lip. It’s awesome
– I feel more comfortable in that role.

HARRISON FORD
NOVEMBER 2002 FOR K-19: THE WIDOWMAKER
GARY OLDMAN
MAY 2001 FOR THE CONTENDER
So you’ve cornered the market in American heroes. The press had a field day
I don’t play heroes. I play people who have particular dilemmas with you when you were
and they’re dramatised. If it comes off as heroic, that’s a cultural an alcoholic…
definition of the behaviour. But I don’t play heroes. I play guys that Well, I’ve experienced some of
behave well under difficult circumstances. it, yeah. But there is not one
picture of me coming out of a
What about those that don’t behave well under difficult nightclub. There were no
circumstances? You know, bad guys, who you don’t tend to play. photographs of me beating
Often the bad guy’s part is not as good. Bad guys can get away with people up. I did a great deal of my drinking on my own.
all kinds of extreme behaviour in place of creating a more But, yeah, it’s really hard to get away from that image. I’m
complicated character. Leading-man parts are harder to play too because they carry the burden still trying to turn that ship around, it’s like trying to turn
of the whole film. the Titanic round on a nickel.

While it sounds like you’re willing to take chances in your career, you don’t sound like Is it as important to get a debate going as it is to
a man who likes to take unnecessary risks… entertain people?
I’ve never trusted myself to do certain things until I got to a certain age. I never rode We want movies that make us think and engage us – and
motorcycles ’til I was past 45 – I wasn’t too much of a wild child. I knew my limits and they should offend us and they should piss us off. A lot of
rarely exceeded them. people think like this, but Hollywood keeps pouring all
this money into this big machine that keeps turning out
You also got that earring pretty late in life! shit and they serve it up and think everybody wants to go
I had lunch with singer Jimmy Buffett and TV journalist Ed Bradley. We all had the same phones and see it. Maybe they do. They buy tickets.
and watches, but I realised I didn’t have an earring like they did. I always wanted a pierced ear so
I got my left ear pierced. I like it. Is taking the big Hollywood bucks from films like
Hannibal and Lost In Space the means to a purer end
for you – roles in indies and directing Nil By Mouth?
I NEVER RODE MOTORCYCLES I hope not to have to keep doing it, but I don’t think you
should spend your own money when there’s plenty to go
’TIL I WAS PAST 45. I WASN’T round to make the kind of film I want to make. Now, if I go
A WILD CHILD. I KNEW MY LIMITS and do a Donna Karan ad and they want to pay me a
sizeable amount of money to model some clothes, then
AND RARELY EXCEEDED THEM that keeps me at home, that buys me four months.

CLASSIC FILM | THE TF INTERVIEW


MARTIN SCORSESE
FEBRUARY 2003
FOR GANGS OF NEW YORK
Robert De Niro was
originally down to play
Daniel Day-Lewis’s
part, right?
Well, with Bob De Niro,
what happens is we have
a very close relationship.
So much so we don’t
even see each other any more. We only see each
other like families do, at terrible things like
wakes, funerals…
Or weddings?
Exactly. It’s hysterical: the other night, I was involved
in a GoodFellas reunion. Ray Liotta came in,
Lorraine Bracco, myself, Bob De Niro… And Bob
said: “Even Marty and I don’t see each other that
much – only at big events and personal stuff.” Very
often De Niro will tell me what he’s doing and I
have sent him projects and gotten his script notes.
Basically, that’s what happened with GONY.
I always check in with him to see what he’s doing
and he always checks in with me.
What kind of stories do you like to tell?
I think I mainly tell stories about people in
well-defined circles, who are aware of certain limits,
who struggle to respect them and sometimes fall
foul of those limits. People will always point to films
like GoodFellas and Casino to emphasise the
gangster element, but they have to see how the
issues that face the characters in those films are
similar to the issues we face every day of our lives.
We all have to struggle with good and evil.
KATE WINSLET
JANUARY 2009 FOR
THE READER AND
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD
You’ve won numerous awards. Ever sit back and say,
“Yeah, I’m fucking good at my job”?
I am… Wait, I have to answer this carefully. [Long
pause]. I am proud of the nominations… probably
prouder than I’d care to admit a lot of the time. There’s
perhaps an assumption out there that I don’t really
need it, but actors are insecure people; when
someone tells you that you’re good, it really bloody
means a lot.
Many young British actors look up to you.
Really? Wow. I didn’t know that. [Suddenly starts to
cry and looks immediately mortified] I’m sorry, this
is pathetic. [Produces a tissue and wipes eyes
furiously]. That means a huge deal. For many years,
I was the fat kid who didn’t get the audition or I was
at the end of the line because my name begins with
a “W” and they’d run out of time and I wouldn’t get to
go in at all. To be able to set an example is… amazing,
absolutely incredible. We all need people to look up
to. For me it was Jodie Foster or Meryl Streep.
They’re playing real parts and they’re absolutely
honest. To me, that was a beacon. It’s not about airs
and graces and it’s not about being a movie star, it’s
about acting.
INTERVIEWS
DENZEL WASHINGTON
JULY 2004 FOR MAN ON FIRE
What was it like to win the
Oscar for Training Day?
It was beautiful. It was also
wonderful to win and have
had the chance to express
my thanks to Sidney Poitier,
who was given an honorary
Oscar on the same evening,
and thank him for being the first great Afro-American
star. He paved the way. Awards are great, of course,
but I don’t try to get my head filled with glory because
of them. My mother has a saying, “Man gives the
award but God gives the reward.” I’m looking for the
reward. Awards are the icing on the cake.
You don’t really play the celebrity game…
That’s the way I like it. I like to keep a comfortable
distance between my life as an actor and my life as
a father and husband. I don’t need to feel the adulation
of people and see my face on the covers of magazines.
I try to do interesting work as an actor and I leave my
participation in the celebrity process at that level.
You hit 50 this year. How would you say
you’ve changed?
I’m a much more relaxed person. I’m a lot looser and
more confident than I was in my twenties. I also think
that being a husband and father has made me a

much more rounded human being. When I was
young… I took things very seriously and I guess that
was part of the minister’s son in me that took hold.
But when you’re raising children, you have to learn to
be able to play with your kids, relax and not worry
about life too much. My children have taught me to
have some fun.

EWAN MCGREGOR
APRIL 2005 FOR REVENGE OF THE SITH
You got to fight Darth Vader!
I’d never experienced exhaustion like it at work. It was a fucking killer, ’cos each
take has to be fever pitch to work. It was so fast and furious they had to speed
the camera up so that it would look slightly slower, ‘cos it was too quick and
they thought it looked speeded-up. I don’t think the fight was nearly as good [in
Episode II] as it should have been, but I made up for it in number three because
we fucking fight our arses off in that film.

Is critical success important?

I’m never really bothered if films aren’t successful, because they’ve always been
good for me in one way or another. I liked doing The Serpent’s Kiss. I met my best
friend Charley Boorman and I spent a lovely time in Ireland, got very drunk all
the time, had a laugh and produced not a brilliant film, but it’s not the be-all-
and-end-all. I really don’t lose any sleep over it.

O^eo^m@he]fbg^ was quite a shoot…

Yeah, I was fucking Christian Bale – Batman – up the arse on a rooftop in King’s
Cross and the crew were filming from an adjacent rooftop. So I start pumping
away slowly then more like a bunny rabbit, then like a Jack Russell. And I say
[to him], “I’m sure I’d have come by now. I’m going to have a look.” And I
glanced back and I saw the crew packing up! I think Todd [Haynes] had been
so respectful of us that he hadn’t wanted to interrupt us by saying, “cut”…

THE TF INTERVIEW | CLASSIC FILM

 ROBERT DE NIRO
MARCH 2007 FOR THE GOOD SHEPHERD
Is there a reason you’ve never embraced interviews?
It’s hard to express what I’ve done. What I’ve done in the movie is my form of
expression, and that’s it. To have to talk about it, or explain it, which is valid
from an interviewer’s viewpoint… Um, it’s, er… sometimes it’s just hard. You
can’t articulate things that you’ve articulated best in the things that you’ve
just put out there.

Many of your characters aren’t the most verbal. Does that partly come
from you?
Possibly, of course, y’know… but, um, I think, as I said, you don’t have to
always be expressing things verbally unless the character is a certain type
of character who expresses himself best verbally. Y’know? It is what it is.
Character, situation, circumstances…

Would you concede that there have been downs as well as ups in the last
10 years of your career?
I feel pretty good. There have been some downs but they’re not important. We
all have ups and downs. You keep moving ahead.

How do you cope with celebrity?

Er, well, y’know, it’s OK. If someone asks me for an autograph while I’m in
a restaurant eating with my family or something I’ll go, “No, no, not now…”

What’s it like to be branded The Greatest Actor Of All Time?

Well, that’s very nice of you to say! I dunno… There are many great actors.

SIGOURNEY WEAVER DANIEL DAY-LEWIS WINONA RYDER

OCTOBER 2006 FOR SNOW CAKE MARCH 2010 FOR NINE JANUARY 2011 FOR THE DILEMMA


What draws you to
a character?
I’m drawn to playing
unconventional women.
I love to be a part of
telling these stories about
women who have to go
their own way, whether
they want to or not. And
I don’t think it’s always been a choice. It’s more like,
“Oh, fuck it, I have to go and take care of some
gorillas…” I just remember growing up and seeing all
these images of women everywhere, perfect women,
not a hair out of place, and thinking “I want to be like
that.” So when I grew up, I wanted to play women who
were not like that so I could show what’s behind it.
There’s a lot of focus
on your extensive
preparation. Does
that annoy you?
Oh god help me if it
annoyed me because it’s
been going on so long
now, I daresay I’m used
to it. But I do feel it’s very
misleading. A lot of what’s said, it’s sort of missing the
point. You know, the time in prison, the time in the
wheelchair, the time skinning animals… those are
details. It’s obvious you need to understand an
experience that isn’t your own. You try and reach
an understanding any way that you can. But that’s
not the central work; it’s part of the work.
Did you see the parallels
between yourself and
your character in
Black Swan?
[Nods] Doing the
character was really
cool in a way because
I’m a bit older and the
whole idea there’s
these young actresses coming up. I’m sort of
“old school”! I like the idea of being replaced,
especially now I’ve just turned 39. When I started
acting I wanted to be like [Rosemary’s Baby star]
Ruth Gordon, because I was always the kid and
always wanted to be older. So it’s interesting for me
to be older than people now.

Did you think Ripley would become such an icon?
When they first dressed me up as Ripley it was in one
of those pink and blue uniforms. Ridley Scott said,
“You look like fucking Jackie O’NASA.” We went into
this room where there were all these costumes from
NASA and he tore it apart until we found an actual
flight suit. And that’s what I wore. But no one on that
film was a feminist. Everyone thought, “Who will ever
think the woman is gonna be the survivor?”, so it was
just one big gag. I’m amazed that I’ve been allowed to
come back to the character four times.
Do you want to do Alien 5?
I talked to Ridley about it. But… in these times, to go
to another planet would be like a vacation. To have a
monster, right in front of me, that I can kill – it seems so
simple, so innocent. We need movies like that.
When you go home at night, do you take your
characters with you?
Absolutely not – can you imagine? Apart from anything
else, kids are so wised up these days they would take
the piss out of me from dawn till dusk if I tried that on.
But it does have its complexities, to come home and
bring some residual mood or feeling or preoccupation
from work.
You seem very much at ease now. In the past, you’ve
often been portrayed as an artist who’s tormented
by demons…
Whoever it is you’re meeting today is the same
person, give or take, that anyone would have met for
the last 25 years. I’ve had ups and downs but the idea
of demons? It’s not somebody I recognise, when I’m
described that way.
One of the films you’re most famous for is
Beetlejuice. Do you feel that that film defined you
as this edgy, cool little kid?
It’s amazing how that movie is the movie that I get
stopped for. Every time I go through airport security
they make me say “Beetlejuice” three times before
they let me through! I had such a gut reaction when
I read the script. I loved it.
So when you end up on the Oscars’ In Memoriam
reel, which character do you hope they put up there
to epitomise your work?
I love The Crucible – it’s one of those performances
that I’m very proud of. But I also loved Little Women
because I feel that was one of the few movies made
about a woman’s adolescence, so I have a soft spot
in my heart for that. CF

CLASSIC FILM | THE TF INTERVIEW

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