All language subtitles for 5 - Channeling Your Influences

I always found that

that going to see a film and studying it at the moment

as you're watching it for the first time

doesn't work

um you have to let the film work on you or not

then if you're hit by certain things

if you you know

you go there and you

you go back and you try to find

very often if you imagine a sequence or scene or two

that's edited a certain way

you find that the camera wasn't that close

but it appeared that close in your memory

that's interesting why

well maybe use sound effect

maybe use of a cut

you see our camera move

that was imperceptible at first

so there wasn't almost like a memorization of

I guess it was almost like a photographic memory of

images editing um

sequences in the film

um scenes shots

and so I would draw upon that

don't forget

there was really no way of seeing these things

unless it was shown on television again

arbitrarily

or it was playing in a theater somewhere

and you had to go to find that theater

you know um

and so you had to do it from memory

uh whether it was the marshals badge

on the third ground um

against the boot of Gary Cooper at the end of high noon

or you know um

part of the chariot race

and Ben her

you had to go and see the film again

you can make little drawings try to

I used to try to draw my own versions of these things

from memory

you know and so um

I remember seeing the small back room

a Paul Pressburger film

um on television

and an afternoon one day

I think in the mid

mid early to mid fifties

and I remembered the mood of this

this film is a very strange film

I recall very

very clearly the opening title sequence um

particularly uh

there's a shot of traffic light

changing from red to green

of course it's a black and white film

but you do get the impression

it's the angle of the of the

the traffic light

and it's the rain that's in the frame around it

there's something about that shot that made it

very powerful and memorable

I only saw it once

and also through the windshield

as that person is driving

as Michael Goff

I think is driving in the beginning

and through the windshield

it's the London during the war

everything is dark

and the windshield is

the windshield wipers are wiping away this heavy rain

and you're looking through

and those two images became really

the key images for taxi driver

there's another shot in there too

and Taxi Driver that he goes to buy guns um

this is a specific reference for example

but he goes to buy guns from Andy in the hotel room

and he picks up one of the guns

he goes to the window

and the gun is pointed at two or three women outside

I could put an umbrella

but that's placed on a dolly or a track

and it tracks over

and there was always something I loved

in this King Beatles film

Northwest Passage

there's an attack by the

Native Americans against the fort

and at one point

he has somebody with a rifle

cameras shooting over that person with the rifle

and you see the native running in the background

and the man is put on a track a dolly

the actor and he's

the camera just tracks with him

fires a gun

running along

tracking along

in the same direction as the native was running

so we tried the similar thing that was directly

and I started putting them um

Travis on a dolly at times

although we did it in a

in a Main Streets too

but not particularly with the

not as specific as with the gun from Northwest Passage

when we started making films

we were uh very conscious of cinema around us

particularly the older Hollywood cinema too so um

this was a time when you could actually make reference

to films that people considered just quote

entertainment unquote

um and there were people around the world

and France and England Italy

other places

Japan who knew what you were talking about

and so we started making references

and this was our generation doing that

um you know

again the French filmmakers

young Lucadore making a reference

directly to Humphrey Bogart

in a Buddhist Breathless

where Belmondo looks at an image of Bogart

I think from The Harder They Fall

his last film

and he does the

gesture that Bogart always was known for

with his thumb and says

bogey I think

there was

references to Hawks films

references to Hitchcock constantly in those films

my first kind of a feature is

who's that knocking on my door

which is kind of a look at us

kind of a juvenelia is kind of like a

we were trying things

took about three or four years to make over time

trying to find how to tell her a story

without telling a straight narrative

we used references to Westerns in the film as a

starting point for conversations

they were like

testing each other

and so the reference

particularly to the searchers

which everyone knows now

to a certain extent

but at that time

the searchers was not considered a very good film

um it was like a franchise picture

for example

it was always

usually a John Ford film

Hitchcock had a film a year

so Vertigo was

it was ignored

um it's just not

the Hitchcock film was a little murky

they felt the audience

and I should say

the critics more

but at the age of 13 and 14

the searches

was something that was really important to us

um when we saw it

um that reflected

the world we were in

the America that we knew

or that we were experiencing at that time

um and the poor tense of the character of Ethan Edwards

and so and the beauty of the film the poetry

the imagery and the language

we use that as a basis

to start conversations in the movie

and that sort of thing

and particularly

you're dealing with a film that had

that took place in Lower East Side

people of certainly wouldn't even have seen a horse

except for one of the two policemen on horses on

on Print Street maybe