Original subtitles

At the end of the 1800s a new art form flickered into live.

It looked like our dreams.

Movies are multi-billion dollar global entertainment industry now.

But what drives them isn't box-office or showbiz.

It's passion, innovation!

So let's travel the world to find this innovation for ourselves.

To discover it in this man, Stanley Donen,

who made Singing in the Rain.

And in Jane Campion in Australia.

And in the films of Ky�ko Kagawa

who was in perhaps the greatest movie ever made.

And Amitabh Bachchan, the most famous actor in the world.

And in the movies of Martin Scorcese and Spike Lee,

Lars Von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.

Welcome to the story of film, an odyssey.

An epic tale of innovation across twelve decades,

six continents and a thousand films.

In this chapter we explore the movies of the Coen brothers

and Quentin Tarantino and discover Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet.

Almost every film made during the first 100 years

of the story of film was made like this.

To get a shot to move through space, you put the camera on something that moved.

To film a deer, as we do here, fleetingly,

you had to find a real deer and photograph it.

Unless, of course, you drew an animated deer like Bambi.

But then came the first days of digital.

Look at this shot.

Smoke coming out of buildings.

Sunlight from top right.

It looks like the camera was on a helicopter.

All attempts to make the shot look like a real city,

photographed, but it isn't.

These tiny horses kicking up dust, look like the deer in the previous shot,

but they're not.

A place like this is where this shot was made.

Almost everything in the shot was drawn on a computer, like this one.

D.W. Griffith had to put a camera on a giant crane

to create this gliding shot of an ancient city.

Here, in the first days of digital, director Ridley Scott

wanted to create a gliding, epic shot of an ancient city

with tiny people, like ants, too.

Computers became central to cinema in the 1990s.

Instead of film imagery being made up of tiny grains of silver halide on celluloid,

it became tiny rows of digital information: ones and zeros.

In 1921, a boy electrician called Philo Farnsworth, was plowing a field.

He looked at the rows of earth and realized that imagery could be made

of tiny rows of picture information too, scanned at incredible speeds.

Jump 70 years, and you get this.

A liquid-metal representation of a person turns into a photographed actor.

Director James Cameron, had his design and technical teams

scan the photographed image into the computer.

Then they drew shiny surfaces, movements, and reflections

to make it look like the man had become Mercury.

The technique became known as computer generated imagery, CGI.

Live action and animation had been combined before,

as far back as Gene Kelly dancing with Jerry mouse in Anchors Aweigh.

But this was crucially different, Jerry looked 2-dimensional.

The light on him doesn't change.

He looked like he'd been drawn.

But the liquid-metal man looked like he'd been photographed.

The metal seemed to have real substance, as if it was actually in the helicopter here,

reflecting the light in the shot and the head of the pilot.

Get out.

The implications were astonishing.

It was if cinema had been rewound and started again, from the olden days.

The first animators tried to show a dinosaur.

The wobbly lines show that it was drawn with real human hands.

Now, Steven Spielberg could do so with such hyper-realism

that we could almost smell a dinosaur's breath.

Apprehend the texture of the dinosaur's skin.

The shadows cast by the small one, the reflections on the floor

of the feet of the T-Rex.

This is the only surviving footage of the ocean liner, the Titanic.

A flickering pan right that shows its massiveness, its hope.

As we watch we imagine the grand tragedy that befell it.

Eighty years later, James Cameron shows us what we've long wanted to see,

as if it had actually been photographed.

The sinking liner, by the light of the silvery moon.

Shots filmed in deep space to show the height of the boat

and the length of the jump.

Seventies cinema had been about what we wanted to see:

Jaws, The Exorcist, Star Wars.

Nineties cinema had become "can see."

This was exciting.

Movies had become spectacle again, about the thrill of seeing,

as if for the first time.

But once the thrill has passed, old questions remain.

The first is about admiration or ethics.

Real human courage and imagination goes into a shot like this.

The camera and the guy are really strapped to the plane

as it does a scary loop-the-loop.

Hard work and long hours spent in relative comfort,

eating pizza, go into a shot like this.

Despite its bravura, has reality lost some of its realness?

The second old question is a human question.

It's the theme of the story of film.

Innovation.

All techniques, including CGI, should be used inventively.

The first mainstream feature film to be made

entirely with a computer was this inventive one.

Director John Lassiter and his team use the new possibilities of CGI

to render shadows, do dynamic deep staging,

and see from positions that would be difficult for a real camera to shoot from.

This was the pricey end of CGI but, as always, innovation doesn't need to be expensive.

This film was not only shot mostly on low-tech digital video,

but marketed on the Internet.

It has the look and sound of camcorder video footage.

His voice is close to the camera, recorded by its internal mic.

The whites in her face burn out, a very video effect.

In the same year digital cinemas opened up

in America, Korea, Spain, Germany, and Mexico.

And, in 2001 to 2002, George Lucas shot

Star Wars: Episode 2 entirely without using celluloid.

And, as has often been the case in the story of film,

Asian filmmakers were even more innovative.

Here's Zhang Yimou's House of Flying Daggers."

A blind dancer.

To challenge her, a man flicks a bean against drums, to create sounds around her.

The camera rushes forward with the bean, then swishes left.

The bean's computer generated.

Motion blur, again computer generated.

Then her sleeve garment picks up a CGI sword.

Then the man throws a CGI plate at her.

She's seeing and not seeing, but so are we.

Images doing things they could never do before,

all with brilliant Chinese choreography and grace.

Remarkable innovation.

The theme of the story of film.

But if what ran through the camera in the '90s,

digital tape rather than celluloid, changed.

What ran in front of the camera seemed to change too.

Reality seemed to lose some of its realness.

Life was no longer just modern, it became postmodern, playful.

In the '90s, American films like Schindler's List, LA confidential,

and The Silence of the Lambs were serious '40s genre pictures,

in new guises.

But the real flavors of the times were irony and postmodernism.

The idea that there are no great truths and that everything's recycled.

More than previously, filmmakers started playing games with old genres,

quoting from previous films, making films about films.

Even the master of new American cinema of the '70s,

Martin Scorsese, started doing this.

Look at the ending of Scorsese's film, Goodfellas.

Like several of his movies, it's about gangsters.

But what's different is that this gangster

looks right into the camera, a very post-modern thing to do.

I'm an average nobody.

I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.

And then, out of nowhere, Joe Pesci shoots right down the lens.

A surprising shot, until we remember that one of the oldest films ever made,

The Great Train Robbery, did the same thing.

Scorsese knew this shot and repeated it.

Film quoting film.

A very '90s thing to do.

American movies of the '90s were full of playful twists on old films.

In this classic film noir from the '40s, for example,

two killers are about to do a hit.

The lighting's dark, the shadows are from German expressionism

and, typically, the killers don't say much.

There's little dialogue.

Compare that to this scene of two killers about to do a hit

in one of the most influential gangster pictures of the '90s, Pulp Fiction.

The lighting's much brighter but what's more noticeable

is that in Pulp Fiction, they talk.

A lot.

Talking about everyday stuff, like foot massages,

isn't exactly something that Humphrey Bogart would have done.

Scenes like this breathed new life into American screenplay writing.

They stopped the story but opened up the discourse.

They have no sense of humor about this shit!

You know what I'm saying?

It's an interesting point.

Come on. Let's get into character.

It's as if they'd been out of character.

Like they forgot that they're in a movie.

What's her name again?

Mia.

Mia.

As if to emphasize the dialogue, the shot remains static,

behind the two guys, so we listen rather than look.

Take care of her?

No, man.

Just take her out, you know?

Show her a good time. Make sure she don't get lonely.

You gonna be taking Mia Wallace out on a date?

It is not a date.

You know, it's just... it's like if you were

going to take your buddy's wife to a movie, or something.

It's just good company, that's all.

It's not a date.

It's definitely not a date.

This emphasis on the surrealism of everyday talk

became known as Tarantino-esque, after the film's writer-director

Quentin Tarantino.

Tarantino-esque somehow meant both more real, and less real than life at the same time.

And Tarantino wasn't only significant for his dialogue.

Like Scorsese, he was a hyperlink to film history.

For example he championed in America this Hong Kong director Wuen Woo-Ping,

whom we've already met.

Tarantino then hired master Yuen to choreograph the Kill Bill films.

And look at this scene in Tarantino's film Reservoir Dogs.

In long lens, wearing black glasses, Harvey Keitel shoots the police with two guns.

Five years earlier, in Ringo Lam's Hong Kong film, City on Fire,

Danny Lee, in black glasses, shoots the police with two guns.

And here's the climax of Reservoir Dogs.

Three jewel thieves pull guns on each other.

A death triangle.

A warehouse.

A police mole's bleeding.

Wide shot then close-ups.

The thieves have just done a failed heist.

Joey, if you kill that man, you die next.

Repeat.

If you kill that man, you die next.

Larry, we have been friends...

And here's the climax of City on Fire.

Three Jewel thieves pull guns on each other.

A death triangle.

We're in a warehouse.

A police mole is sitting below them.

Wide shot then close ups.

The thieves have just done a failed heist.

Talk about d�j� vu.

Movie making about the story of film.

And it wasn't only action cinema that Tarantino admired.

He loved this art movie, Jean Luc Godard's Bande � Part.

This is its title sequence.

Fast cut close ups of the main characters,

the letters cutting graphically up on screen.

Tarantino used this title for his own production company,

a band apart.

He was punning on film history.

How '90s.

His company logo appeared graphically, yellow on black,

at the start of "Pulp Fiction."

Tarantino's postmodernism was in his writing,

but a look at Natural Born Killers, made by Oliver Stone

from Tarantino's screenplay, shows that, visually, Tarantino was a traditionalist.

A young couple is on a rampage.

Stone has this scene shot on film, on a glide cam, and graded green.

This P.O.V. shot is also on film, but in full color.

Then we're on handheld video.

This mash up of styles is almost a definition of postmodernism.

No one type of image could capture the truth.

Reality was multiple and fragmented.

A fourth strain of '90s postmodernism was the kooky, technically brilliant,

films of Minnesota born brothers Joel and Ethan Coen.

They started the '90s with this great image.

A hat falls into the foreground.

Trees are out of focus.

Then the wind blows the hat and the focus follows it.

The forest comes into focus.

Then the story begins.

The Coen brothers became masters of visual and story precision.

By the mid-'90s, the Coens had honed their comic-discrepant world view

by focusing on what used to be called, in Frank Capra films,

the "little man," caught up in events that he barely understands.

Here the little man is a novice mailroom worker.

But he becomes a chief executive with the big cigar to show it.

The film's shot in blues and Navy's.

The novice is pure Coen brothers.

A gormless, rather asexual man, out of his depth,

having strayed into the world of Capra, or Preston Sturges, or Howard Hawks.

George Clooney played a similar trespasser in O Brother, where art thou?

Clooney was wide eyed and clueless.

The imagery this time was golden.

And talk about wide eyed.

Here's Jeff Bridges, high as a kite, in The big Leboswki.

A tower of ten pin bowling shoes.

His are handed out by Saddam Hussein.

The war on Iraq was on and the Coen's wanted to refer to it.

And then we're in another '30s genre, the Busby Berkley musical.

The big Leboswki brilliantly married slacker dude-ness with surreal design,

a fondness for old Hollywood and '90s politics.

The Coen's affection for their men gave their postmodernism heart.

The most daring American postmodernist of the '90s,

and one of the country's greatest filmmakers, was this man: Gus Van Sant.

He's influenced by a wide range of movies, styles and periods,

and refers to them as he talks.

Van Sant's film, My own private Idaho," was about this young narcoleptic hustler.

To show what the hustler feels like when he has an orgasm,

Van Sant used the image of a barn falling onto a road.

Seldom had a sex scene been pictured so imaginatively.

I think when I was a painter and I think by the time I stopped painting,

the last thing I was painting were these landscapes.

And definitely in My own private Idaho for instance,

the whole barn crashing into the landscape was literally from one of the paintings.

The film was full of empty landscape shots, golden light, the open road.

Van Sant had intended to shoot other images,

and use them to show what the hustler felt as he lost consciousness,

but he didn't have time to film them.

But we did have the one image of the barn falling.

So, since I had this, like, singular image, which was somewhat like,

I guess, the singular image in The Shining, of the blood coming out of the elevator.

It was this one stand-alone special effect that was really beautiful.

So, we tried it just right in the middle of his orgasm

because it was another kind of falling, you know, I think.

Van Sant's signature film, Elephant,

was also about the fall from grace of young men.

No movie of the '90s was more complexly connected to film history.

Elephant was a response to the shootings at a school in Columbine.

The film's shot in the unfashionable, 4x3 screen ratio.

Van Sant follows young men with a steadicam.

There's little dialogue.

The violence is unexplained.

Fourteen years earlier, the British director, Alan Clarke,

made a film called Elephant, which used steadicam to show the driven,

almost trance-like walking of gunmen in northern Ireland.

HBO was the only company that was interested in not making

Columbine, but they were interested in making Elephant

and they were referring to the Alan Clarke film.

So it became known to us as Elephant,

because of that label and I think it was a sort of similar statement

it was a very abstract statement about Columbine.

The constant walking in Clarke's Elephant,

influenced the forward walking in real time, without much cutting,

in Van Sant's Elephant, and in his earlier movie, Gerry.

These films felt, in some way, like video games,

which became a new influence on '90s cinema.

This one, Tomb Raider, with its image tracking forward

to follow the main character, from place to place, was particularly popular.

Yeah, the videogame aspect is, including "Gerry" and "Last Days,"

is coming from video games.

Me playing video games was an effort for me to understand

what was going on with the Columbine characters

because it was said that they had played video games

and so I didn't know what they were.

And I had a computer and my assistant said,

"oh, well you can download the first level of 'Tomb Raider, '"

and I was like, "what's 'Tomb Raider?'" and he said,

"oh, that's just like a game, you know?

There's lots of different games."

I said, "oh there's different ones?" Like, I didn't know anything about it.

They were playing "Doom," which is a different game,

but I guess you couldn't find "Doom" on the computer

so I started playing "Tomb Raider" and became very, you know, amused by it,

and occupied by it in the way people do become occupied by video games.

And so the video games were also informing.

Video games are often doing what we were doing in "Gerry."

To get from point a to point b you have to actually travel there.

You can't cut like in cinema.

You cut to the new location.

You actually, like, walk.

Like in reality.

Because of that I started thinking about like, cinema like that.

And if the influences on Van Sant weren't already rich enough,

he then saw the brilliant Hungarian films of B�la Tarr.

Tarr's S�t�ntang� shows the beauty of walking too,

the epic forward camera moves, and the expressionism of blowing litter.

Compare this to Van Sant's film, Gerry.

But this obsession with the beauty of walking,

moving through space in real time, couldn't be applied to another

Van Sant film, Last Days,

which was inspired by the death of rock star Kurt Cobain.

We had made "Elephant", which was very long, pensive, travelling shots

down the hallways of the high-school, that recalled B�la's work.

And we had... Now we're in a house which had no expansive hallways.

And so our DP, sort of like thought of "Jeanne Dielman" and thought

maybe we should think in terms of that rather than travelling shots.

Maybe, you know, maybe more fixed shots which we did.

Jeanne Dielman is full of such fixed shots.

It's this Belgian film by Chantal Akerman.

Akerman films square on, in kitchens and domestic settings.

Some of the shots of the rock star in Last Days are remarkably similar.

- "Jeanne Dielman" is one of my favorite films

and, in fact, in this documentary that we're making, in our section on Ozu...

- Right, right.

We put in a bit of Dielman because the camera is as low as in Ozu.

Yeah.

Ozu was also on our minds, and because of the...

Where you have your camera now, I mean, it was,

you know, however many... 30 inches off the ground.

I think it was, like, a 40-millimeter lens, and so, yeah.

We always had it like, you know, 36 inches off the ground

and it was always a 35-millimeter lens.

But not even Van Sant's close reworking of Ozu and European cinema

prepared us for this shot for shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's film, Psycho.

The original was based on a true story.

The remake was based on a film.

Anne Heche was playing not so much a real person,

as a movie star playing a real person.

Welcome to the first days of digital.

Van Sant's movie departed from the original only in tiny details, such as here,

where he inserts unexpected shots of clouds into the famous shower sequence.

At the moment of death, Van Sant's woman's pupil dilates.

And in the '90s you could show more nudity.

Van Sant couldn't quite keep his instinctive surrealism in check

but, strangely, thinks his film is very different from Hitchcock's.

The intentions of the movie was to see what would happen

if you tried to, you know, literally do the same thing.

What did happen, and, what I learned from it,

was that even though your camera angles are actually the same,

the performances are close, but the kind of intentions of the filmmaker

and the soul of the filmmaker is different.

My "Psycho" became devoid of

like some of the most important things that were in the original

which were these sort of dark, underlying tensions.

You know, in mine, it's...

the dark underlying tensions are kind of, like, not there.

There's something else there that doesn't really fit

with what "Psycho" is, so it kind of became a, you know,

an example of like how you can't really copy something.

I think that... I think it's just the way that I've been,

you know, creating and relating to film, structurally.

As being a language all its own

and being basically, the language itself, being what the film is about, you know.

What films are generally about.

They can have subjects but in the end it's the language that's the true subject.

Jump from Gus Van Sant to this man in the first days of digital,

and you find someone pushing cinema even further in the direction of art and ideas.

The New York times called him, "the greatest artist of his generation."

Matthew Barney used to be a sportsman.

And just like sportsmen work up a sweat,

building their bodies, so Barney works up a sweat making his films.

Here he is doing something like indoor rock climbing.

But this is no ordinary scene.

Barney's playing a character.

An apprentice-artist, working hard at his art.

The film's called Cremaster, after the cremaster muscle

that makes human testicles rise and fall.

Barney rises, but other things fall.

And we're in the Guggenheim museum in New York.

In Barney's film, it represents a human vagina,

and New York's Chrysler building represents a penis.

Barney is dressed in Scottish tartan because in 1992,

he did a drawing of a bagpipe with five pipes,

each representing a place where he would film.

One of the places was New York.

That's why we're here.

Maybe this makes the film sound overloaded with symbolism

but it has the beauty and determination of this silent comedy,

in which Harold Lloyd climbs a building.

Lloyd encounters obstacles too.

His climb is a vertical storyline of little incidents, like Barney's.

Now Barney's apprentice has reached the top of the Guggenheim,

where we encounter his master, the sculptor, Richard Serra.

In dark clothes here,

who's melting vaseline which will trickle down

the corkscrew of the building.

Rise and fall.

Barney the surrealist loves the texture of vaseline.

On lower levels we glimpse a punk band who've impeded Barney's climb.

The first days of digital were full of films referring to other movies and ideas,

but few looked from such a great height as Barney's.

There are five cremaster films.

They're a movie world all of their own.

The coming of digital and postmodernism in cinema

made America in the '90s fizz like lemonade,

but the movies of the times were innovative in another way.

Through satire.

Two of the ballsiest satires of the late '80s and '90s

were directed by Paul Verhoeven and written by this man, Ed Neumeier,

who's as hyperactive and as full of ideas

as his films, and his times.

Their first collaboration was Robocop.

It was certainly a reaction to what was in the Reagan era,

particularly though... it was a reaction to...

There was in the '80s, there was a period where businessmen...

Japan was on the rise, and businessmen started kind of reading

those samurai books and talking about themselves as killers.

And so there was this notion of trying to bring actual violence

into the boardroom, as it were.

That was part of the idea.

You now have 15 seconds to comply.

Businessmen want to make money by launching this new police robot.

It roars like a lion.

We're in a typical power boardroom.

Fast cutting.

Steely blue colors.

I am now authorized to use physical force.

I had a theory, which is not an original theory,

that if you did something very violent in a movie and then you told a joke,

that you would use...

The tension of the violence would come out in the laugh.

Can you pull the plug on this thing?

Don't touch him!

Don't touch him!

He didn't hear it!

Dick, I'm very disappointed.

I'm sure it's only a glitch.

A temporary setback.

You call this a glitch!?

But the businessmen try again and come up

with a more liberal policing machine this time,

a dead cop brought back to life as Robocop.

What their parents only read about in comic books.

Robo! Excuse me, robo!

Any special message for all the kids watching at home?

Stay out of trouble.

Neumeier wrote scenes that mocked the happy talk of TV news,

the kind of satirical writing that we saw in films

like The Graduate and Catch 22, written by Buck Henry.

I think that people like Buck Henry were luckier because

they were working at a time where you could be a little bit more free

about making those kinds of comments and being overtly satirical.

We've also moved into an era of marketing

and sort of the corporate blockbuster era

where they're really going for the widest possible audience.

They want what they call "four quadrants," they want everybody to like the picture

and they want them to like it all over the world,

almost regardless of culture.

Ten years after Robocop,

Neumeier penned this even more satirical postmodern film,

which was based on a rabidly right-wing novel

about the threat to humans by alien bugs.

The battle scenes were as exciting as Star Wars.

The bugs were entirely computer generated.

The look was bright and shiny, the sound track was explosive.

That scene where Johnny walks in, Johnny Rico walks in

to the brain bug cavern and confronts the brain bug, is, you know,

that's every American, maybe not just American,

but that's every soldier in the world coming in saying,

"yeah, you may be smart, but I got a gun," you know?

And "now who's smart?"

Do you know what this is?

Sure you do.

You're some kind of big, fat, smart bug aren't you?

But the politics of Starship Troopers

went deeper than making fun of macho soldiers

and came from a surprising source.

Paul said, �oh I've always wanted to make this movie set

in Germany in 1935 and it's about a bunch of teenagers.

And they're all coming into their life, and its exciting time,

and things are happening in the country, and everybody's joining the Nazi party.�

And the thing that he thought, that what was amusing to him

was he said, �and nobody knew it was wrong.�

And I said to him, "oh, they'll never let us do that!"

In Hollywood, a real story about 1935 Nazi Germany, you know.

Young Nazi's who before they know they're bad.

But that's where Starship came in.

It's about, oh, I guess, it was about 5 years later I thought,

�oh, you could do that with this.�

Officer on deck.

Carry on.

Varial detail.

Dismissed.

I think some people consider it camp.

And what Paul and I decided to do was

we decided not to tell anybody what we were doing.

We decided never, ever let on, "oh yeah, these are the bad guys,

these are the good guys," whatever.

We just played it straight down the middle.

We sort of tip our hand in the third act

where Neil Patrick Harris comes out in a Nazi uniform.

And that was a bit of a controversial decision

because originally you were supposed to understand that through his speech only.

He makes a speech about numbers and this and that

and "i have to kill people every day."

It's a very fascistic idea.

You don't approve?

Well too bad.

We're in this for the species, boys and girls.

It's simple numbers.

They have more.

And every day I have to make decisions

that send hundreds of people like you to their deaths.

Didn't they tell you, colonel?

That's what the mobile infantry's good for.

Later I think we both decided that that was,

to make sure you got it, that that was really the moment.

And I think the audience doesn't like that moment.

I remember being in a preview with...

In the bathroom afterwards when all these young men were coming in,

they'd seen the picture and they were kind of upset

because this was a picture they wanted to embrace

but something in that ending had said, no, maybe these aren't your heroes

or maybe there's something... I think it put a little bit of doubt

into them about it or something like that. I don't know.

Whatcha thinking, colonel?

This is the ending that Neumeier mentions, filmed in golden hues.

The enemy is humiliated.

Tied up.

It has a doleful look.

It's afraid.

It's afraid!

Triumphal music begins to play.

Science fiction particularly allows you to do things politically

that you wouldn't do...

That might not be accepted as easily if you did them straight

because it's not here, it's slightly over here.

It's a little bit skewed and I think humor does the same thing.

And if you add them together in the right way

then you can probably get away with murder if you want.

Neumeier and Verhoeven combine science fiction and politics

to create the spiciest entertainment cinema of their times.

On the other side of the world from America in the '90s,

in Australia and New Zealand, at first it looks like the big trends of the time,

digital, post modernism, and satire, were having no impact.

This New Zealand director, Jane Campion,

emphasizes one of the timeless themes in the story of film,

that to make great movies you must get your unconscious juices flowing.

The unconscious mind is a little bit like a quite shy pet.

And you have to set conditions where it trusts

that if it comes out and plays you'll feed it, you'll pay attention to it,

you won't ignore it, you won't scare it.

So, like, when I first started writing, one of the things that I realized

was that, you know, like, for the first, like,

3 hours when you sit down to something, you know, nothing really happens.

It's like it's testing you: Will you stay for that fourth hour?

I always thought... I always think, you have to create

a very safe environment, you know, personally for yourself.

And also, I think, when you collaborate with actors and people like that too.

Their unconscious selves, you know, which you want to get into play

because that's where the genius is.

It's also shy, it's when you know it's going to be safe.

Once all the signs, you know?

That, you can make mistakes, it doesn't matter,

you can be a fool, it doesn't matter.

We're here to play really. You know?

Campion's great film An Angel at my Table,

is about this very thing.

A shy young woman with a lively unconscious mind,

Janet Frame, doesn't feel safe in the world.

Frame's training to be a teacher.

The whole class is looking, and so is the training assessor.

In this moment, Frame freezes, has a panic attack.

Campion and actress, Kerry Fox, focused the scene on a piece of chalk.

Campion has it filmed in close-up.

I didn't know why, "that will work", that's what I thought, "that will work."

I was looking for something, you know.

I have to admit that when I was doing that I was going:

"Well what's going to make her turn," you know?

How can we visually kind of do something with it?

And then just the idea that I guess her world

kind of crunched into that piece of chalk.

I like to be able to say, "look, I'm really, "

if I need to, " I'm confused about what to do next."

You know, I'm not really sure we've got this scene or I'm not feeling the drama.

It's all about a feeling for me, again, you know.

If I'm feeling it through my body, I can feel it if it's happening

and if it's not you have to say something, because you can't pretend.

You know?

You've got to kind of explore it.

I think one of the things I believe is that you have to be

strong about vulnerability, you know, like, stand up for it.

And stand up for gentleness and softness

'cause I think they're really powerful qualities.

And...'Cause I think, you know, the so called "bluff leadership"

qualities of you know, megaphone type voice on set,

isn't really helpful when it comes for, you know, actors feeling anxious and nervous

and trying to make themselves vulnerable because they're trying to find their channel too.

You know, trust their instrument and if they,

"everybody! Okay! One, two, three. Off you go, argh, argh, argh." You know?

It doesn't respond.

So I always try to create a really relaxing and forgiving atmosphere.

Campion's film, The Piano, used very subjective images and sounds

to suggest the inner world of a girl who's growing up.

Here the child is looking through her fingers.

They look like red curtains about to open onto life.

The voice you hear is not my speaking voice.

But my mind's voice.

I have not spoken since I was 6 years old.

No one knows why. Not even me.

The Piano is the only film directed by a woman

to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival.

The majority of, and the highest paid, screenwriters in early Hollywood

were women, but then filmmaking became more male.

Women make up about 50% of the whole world,

but there's only about 3% of women who are directors

or are actually probably selecting content.

And, you know, it just seems to me really sad that...

Because women's, I think, interests are a lot more, a lot different

than male interests in large, you know, they're, I think, they're a lot more nurturing.

They're much more orientated to connection.

And male interests are much more interested in, sort of, building,

identifying their, sort of, blustering egos or whatever.

Bombing things, blowing things up, being strong men, Spiderman or whatever, you know?

Which I don't think women do and I think, you know,

what's important is to try and not change the guys.

I mean, I think it's fun what they do but to,

sort of, get the balance, you know, have what women do.

But because most of the men run the business I think that's...

They understand or identify much better with what the male interests.

But the audience is actually probably more identifiably female.

Sometimes one of the great betrayals of the female

is that they want to see themselves through male eyes.

So they're very interested in what men do too.

If Jane Campion was the Ingmar Bergman of Australasian cinema,

making films about intense human psychology,

this man, Baz Luhrmann was its flamboyant Vincent Minnelli.

Campion's films could have been made in the 1920s

but Luhrmann's bring us carousing back into the postmodern '90s.

Baz Luhrmann defined the first days of digital.

Like the man himself, his films are a meteor shower

of references to everything from Shakespeare to Bollywood.

Shakespeare and Bollywood cinema had something in common

and what they had in common was the blindness to taste

or style or any of those imposed... Posed ideals about art.

What they were singularly focused on was the engagement

of as many human beings as possible, from as many types of humanity,

to be moved and touched by story.

To deliver a big idea, a big idea through an emotional experience.

Luhrmann used these all-encompassing ideas

about emotion and art, what he called participatory cinema,

to make one of the key films of the '90s,

his hyperactive version of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet."

Captions, fireworks, splintered edits, flash forwards, choirs.

A dog of the house of Capulet!

Shakespeare starts "Romeo and Juliet' with very broad, high comedy.

You know? Standup routine, really.

You know? Almost addressed to camera.

You know? But it had to be broad, it had to be fun, it had to be standup.

Right? To engage the audience, to disarm all of them,

before he suddenly goes: Enter the romantic lead.

Romeo.

Leonardo DiCaprio, back lit, at sunrise, long lens.

In the text the boys meet in the town square.

We're now transporting "Romeo and Juliet"

to a contemporary world that is Miami life,

where religion and politics are mixed up with each other.

There is no town square in an American contemporary city.

But there is a gas station.

Because everybody, they don't ride horses, they drive in trucks and cars.

Where do those cars meet? At the gas station.

Where is the town square? The gas station.

What if we ironically quote the world of cinema?

What if it is like a Sergio Leone, you know, piece of cinema?

And what if it's like a western?

Right?

That would be a good way of doing that.

Sergio Leone shootout meets the town square gas station in high comedy style.

Whether you think we've done it well or not,

if you look at that sequence I think you can see

that that set of choices has at least led to that result.

Whether you agree with it or not, that's how we got there.

I will bite my thumb at them which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it.

Shakespeare's exact comic dialogue.

But his swords are guns here.

And knights have become street kids in Hawaiian shirts.

I do bite my thumb, sir.

Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

Is the law of our side, if I say aye?

No.

No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.

Do you quarrel, sir?

Quarrel, sir!

No, sir.

But if you do, sir, I am for you: I serve as good a man as you.

No better?

A Sergio Leone gunfight shot in close-up.

A track in.

Draw, if you be men!

Part, fools!

You know not what you do.

A Leone widescreen composition and the pan pipe music from his films.

One of Luhrmann's biggest challenges in the film was how to stage,

in an innovative way, the famous scene

where Romeo and Juliet meet for the first time.

The audience know this is going to happen.

How can it happen a way in which their delicious expectation

and enjoyment of, "it's going to happen,"

can be suspended so that, when it happens,

it's a surprise that they knew was going to happen.

It was so perplexing.

We were in Miami and this is, I suppose,

the spontaneous, artistic, creative bit of it.

That night we went out to dinner and there was a nightclub.

What happened was I went to the bathroom.

And I was thinking about the problem.

I go into the bathroom, I'm thinking about the problem,

and as I am down washing my hands I look up and can see a girl's hair.

And I look and I think, "this is the most brilliant thing."

It's the anti-chamber of the girl's bathroom.

And after you come out of the bathroom, like I was, you wash your hands,

you comb your hair and there's a fish tank dividing the boy and the girl's anti-chamber.

And it was as simple as going: "That's it! That's the moment."

And that's where it came from.

So it was a combination of extremely academic work,

followed by methodology, just work, labor, process, and

I think maybe being open to the world around us, and luck.

So that's how it happened, that was that one.

Luhrmann's "Moulin Rouge" took his ideas about innovative cinema even further.

At the start of the film, the camera sweeps

through model and computer generated shots of the gray, dank alleyways of Paris,

and then swoops up to the garret of a poet.

His face tear stained because he has loved and lost

a beautiful courtesan.

Then we flash back to the famous nightclub, the Moulin Rouge,

where the love story took place.

It's a frenzied, red, Luhrmann world of wild postmodern song, and love, and space.

At one point the girls sing "voulez-vous couchez avec moi?"

from LaBelle's Lady Marmalade whilst the men crash into

the chorus of nirvana's, "Smells like teen spirit."

No-one in the world was mashing up Sergio Leone, MTV, Hispanic telenovelas,

fashion, cross-dressing, and the kaleidoscopic cinema

of '90s Hong Kong with such aplomb.

Reality had lost its realness in Bazland.

The very definition of the first days of digital.

Luhrmann called Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet,

and Moulin Rouge the red curtain trilogy.

To make them he set himself rules, a kind of manifesto,

that were almost the opposite of Lars Von Trier's dogma rules,

the other great '90s movie manifesto.

The first of Luhrmann's rules was that we need to know the story upfront.

You get the feeling...

I mean, "Moulin Rouge" opens, I think, with the opening line, it's something like,

"the woman I loved is dead. She was the star of the Moulin Rouge."

"Romeo + Juliet" opens with something like,

"doth with their death bury their parents strife."

You are told right up front that the lovers or a lover is going to die.

And by the way, a recent epic, sort of, participatory cinematic work

in the beginning called, "Titanic," it's pretty clear in the beginning

one of them's going to end up below the waters.

So, you... That's one rule: You know where it's going to conclude.

Two, in this red curtain trilogy,

to keep the audience alive and, by the way,

it's kind of after the fact.

I say you've got to have a device, right?

A distancing device.

But really, why would you do a musical without music?

But essentially there's got to be something that keeps the whole cinematic experience heightened.

So you don't fall into, ever, a feeling that it's somehow "keyhole."

That's it's psychological.

You know? In the case of "Strictly Ballroom," you know?

Even dramatic scenes are danced out, you know?

"Wes, come here!" You know? It's dance.

And "Romeo + Juliet" it's the language, you know?

"Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?"

And then "Moulin Rouge," of course, it's song, it's music.

? I was made ?

? for loving you, baby ?

? you were made for loving me ?

? the only way of lovin' me ?

? baby, is to pay a lovely fee ?

? just one night ?

? just one night ?

? there's no way ?

? 'cause you can't pay ?

? in the name of love ?

? one night ?

? in the name of love ?

Visually this is pure romantic cinema: moonlight, a rooftop tryst,

reverse angle editing, two shots.

But the music is a wild '90s mash up of pop songs,

used almost like dialogue, as if reality had been remixed by a DJ.

? Don't leave me this way ?

? you think that people ?

? would have had enough ?

? of silly love songs ?

? I look around me ?

? and I see it isn't so ?

In this participatory cinema, in particular, say, a musical,

you need to know where it's heading and you need the story to be extremely linear.

One thing happens precisely after the other, like math,

so that you can save time, so that you can take the human moment,

"oh, I love you, I love you, I love you," which in a psychological scene might be,

"you know, I really love you."

And music, and the expression of that could take an extra 3 minutes.

And we could expand the emotional experience of that beyond the reality in life.

And that's where the romanticism comes in is that we're making

something that happens in life, better than it is in life.

Bigger than it is in life.

Better and bigger than life.

Exactly what many movie makers aimed for

in the last days of digital at the end of the old millennium.

The story of film was full of the fizz and feedback

of those days, and the rapture of self-loss.

But then came the 21st century.

Synced and corrected by job0@whatkeepsmebusy.today