Beginning with a sequence involving the escape of Katie (Julianne Hough) from police detective Kevin (David Lyons) at a bus station, filmed very much in the vein of a ‘gritty’ television police procedural, the film quickly moves to the perpetually sunny and ‘dreamy’ Southport. This small town in North Carolina provides the main location for the bulk of the film, with a few cuts back to Kevin and his continued hunt for Katie, and with it a host of clichéd ideas about small town living and a selection of even more clichéd inhabitants.

Leading the pack of clichéd Southport residents is Alex (Josh Duhamel), a widowed father of two who takes a liking to the latest resident of Southport, the guarded but reasonably friendly Katie. Alex is drawn in simple but relatively effective broad brush strokes but comes across far more as a robot designed to be everything a woman wants rather than even a weak facsimile of a real person. This ultimately seems to be the modus operandi here, as the basic need to provoke a simplistic response from a weak-minded audience member seems to motivate every character trait and plot point far more than any sense that this all needs to make sense or feel at all genuine.

Katie’s secret for instance, which leads her to flee her home and hide out in Southport is rather flimsy and it’s hard to understand why it needs to remain a secret for so long when most people – especially dreamy widowers – would totally understand and sympathise with her situation. Katie never even opens up to her overly-friendly neighbour Jo (Cobie Smulders) who seems so eager to make Katie happy, for reasons that later become very clear. Simply telling her or Alex would wrap things up too quickly though. She must keep it a secret because it works out ‘better’ for the plot. A plot which follows the three act structure so rigidly that if you check your watch when you think each act is ending you will not be surprised to find that that the film’s runtime has been perfectly split into three.

As the film reaches its climax, with the reveal of Katie’s secret and the arrival of Kevin in Southport, the film begins to ramp up to an absurd and unfortunately comedic level of melodrama, with additional moments of peril thrown in simply to increase the level of threat without any thought to how silly they come across.

In the film’s final scenes the biggest melodramatic secret of all is revealed and it is such an incredibly left-field piece of writing that Sparks and co. almost deserve praise just for having the sheer guts to include it. The final reveal is a twist that is actually painfully obvious around thirty minutes into the film but one that most will undoubtedly dismiss as simply too insanely ridiculous to possibly be real.

Whilst this wonderfully absurd reveal and some of the more histrionically acted scenes do provide some unintended pleasures the film is for the most part an exhausting slog through clichéd characters and formulaic writing that is near impossible to take at all seriously.

I’ve never particularly liked the Oscars and I rarely care too much who wins but I’ve always found them oddly compelling.

As someone who reads a lot of film sites, magazines and listens to a lot of film podcasts the Oscars are also impossible to avoid and every year the volume of coverage seems to get greater and greater. This year I decided that in order to try and combat awards fatigue I would place some bets on the BAFTAs and Oscars, thereby providing me with a manufactured reason to care about the ‘Oscar Race’.

For the most part it’s worked and thanks to a number of critics writing interesting, insightful pieces about many of the Oscar nominated films this awards season has been an occasionally interesting and not too infuriating one to follow.

Last week I was asked by Indiewire to try and predict the Oscar winners and also suggest who I think should win (from those nominated). Having followed the run up to the Oscars reasonably closely I decided to have a go. Below you can read the list that I submitted and also my picks for the other categories not covered by Indiewire’s poll.

As the winners are announced this evening I will also be updating the list, so bookmark this page to see all the winners and find out how many I got right.

Best Picture
Will Win: Argo
Should Win: Amour
The Winner: Argo

Best Director
Will Win: Steven Spielberg
Should Win: Michael Haneke
The Winner: Ang Lee

Best Actor
Will Win: Daniel Day-Lewis
Should Win: Daniel Day-Lewis
The Winner: Daniel Day-Lewis

Best Actress
Will Win: Emmuelle Riva
Should Win: Emanuelle Riva
The Winner: Jennifer Lawrence

Best Supporting Actor
Will Win: Robert De Niro
Should Win: Phillip Seymour-Hoffman
The Winner: Christoph Waltz

Best Supporting Actress
Will Win: Anne Hathaway
Should Win: Anne Hathaway
The Winner: Anne Hathaway

Best Original Screenplay
Will Win: Amour
Should Win: Amour
The Winner: Django Unchained

Best Adapted Screenplay
Will Win: Argo
Should Win: Lincoln
The Winner: Argo

Best Foreign Film
Will Win: Amour
Should Win: Amour
The Winner: Amour

Best Documentary Feature
Will Win: Searching for Sugar Man
Should Win: The Invisble War
The Winner: Searching for Sugar Man

Best Animated Feature
Will Win: Frankenweenie
Should Win: Frankenweenie
The Winner: Brave

Best Cinematography
Will Win: Life of Pi
Should Win: Skyfall
The Winner: Life of Pi

Best Original Score
Will Win: Argo
Should Win: Argo
The Winner: Life of Pi

Original Song
Will Win: Skyfall
Should Win: Chasing Ice
The Winner: Skyfall

Production Design
Will Win: Les Miserables
Should Win: Les Miserables
The Winner: Lincoln

Costume Design
Will Win: Les Miserables
Should Win: Les Miserables
The Winner: Anna Karenina

Film Editing
Will Win: Argo
Should Win: Zero Dark Thirty
The Winner: Argo

Makeup
Will Win: Hitchcock
Should Win: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
The Winner: Les Miserables

Sound Editing
Will Win: Argo
Should Win: Zero Dark Thirty
The Winner: Zero Dark Thirty/Skyfall

Sound Mixing
Will Win: Les Miserables
Should Win: Skyfall
The Winner: Les Miserables

Visual Effects
Will Win: Life of Pi
Should Win: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
The Winner: Life of Pi

Documentary Short
Will Win: Open Heart
Should Win: [Abstained]
The Winner: Inocente

Live Action Short Film
Will Win: Curfew
Should Win: [Abstained]
The Winner: Curfew

Animated Short Film
Will Win: Paperman
Should Win: Paperman
The Winner: Paperman

Charlie Sheen Is Winning With Inside the Mind of Charles Swan II

Whilst I think the way in which Karina Longworth has her cake and eats it with this piece – dismissing those that have written about Sheen whilst falling into similar traps herself – there is some really fascinating detail in this piece at LA Weekly.

Steven Soderbergh on Quitting Hollywood, Getting the Best Out of J-Lo, and His Love of Girls

A great long interview with the now retired (?) filmmaker Steven Soderbergh, which includes the following fascinating piece of news about Kafka:

Well, I’m remaking—it’s been a long process—but I’m overhauling Kafka completely. It’s funny—wrapping a movie 22 years later! But the rights had reverted back to me and Paul Rassam, an executive producer, and he said, “I know you were never really happy with it. Do you want to go back in and play around?” We shot some inserts while we were doing Side Effects. I’m also dubbing the whole thing into German so the accent issue goes away. And Lem and I have been working on recalibrating some of the dialogue and the storytelling. So it’s a completely different movie.

Chinese censoring of Cloud Atlas is true truly a real problem

Hollywood has already begun tailoring films for China and much like Scott Mendelson I suspect this may result have worrying results.

Blu-Ray Consumer Guide: Face Up To Reality February 2013 Edition

Another of Glenn Kenny’s essential Blu-ray posts.

Film as Faith

Filmmaker Alex Barrett on the miracle of cinema.

Lisa Schwarzbaum on loving movies, being a critic, engaging with you, and the beauty of agreeing to disagree

Liza Schwarzbaum’s final post for Entertainment Weekly.

Deep Inside: A Study of 10000 Porn Stars and Their Careers

Crunching the numbers on American porn stars yields some fascinating results.

Criticwatch – The Side Effects of What We Do

E Film Critic provide an update on some of the most shameless quote whores.

Zeebox founder and former iPlayer boss Anthony Rose on the future of TV

Damsel, Arise: A Westboro Scion Leaves Her Church

A very interesting interview with Megan Phelps-Roper, who has recently left the Westboro Baptist church.

Red Obsessions: Film Business Moves from Hollywood to Asia

Another piece on how Hollywood is reacting to the growing market for films in Asia.

Whilst film-makers often deliberately infuse their films with messages relating to current concerns – the allegorical explorations by Romero in his zombie films immediately spring to mind – more subtle or even subconsciousness reflections of recent events often find their way into films.

In the following piece I explore the way in which Wreck-It Ralph, a film that may appear to be simple childish confectionery, can be read as a playful retelling of recent American political and economic history. Whether many of the similarities with recent events are conscious inclusions on the part of the writers – some who have previously worked on The Simpsons and are therefore not strangers to political commentary – is of course in question but, as I hopefully illustrate below, the film certainly supports this kind of reading.

“I was just tired of living alone in the garbage”

“Well now you live alone in the penthouse”

So goes an exchange between Ralph and one of the Nicelanders, the well-to-do residents of the large building that it is Ralph’s job to constantly wreck in the game Fix-It Felix Jr. The conversation between the two occurs when Ralph returns to the game world of Fix-It Felix Jr. having attempted to get a medal and earn his ‘rightful’ place in the building, to live amongst the Nicelanders in a swanky penthouse.

The search for a medal is inspired by the medal that Fix-It Felix earns every time he rescues the Nicelanders, but the one that Ralph manages to procure is from the game Hero’s Duty. Shortly after winning the medal Ralph finds himself in the game world of Sugar Rush – described at one point as a “candy-coated heart of darkness” – and loses the medal to Vanellope von Schweetz, a precocious ‘glitch’ who uses it to enter a race. At this point the medal transforms into a coin.

Ralph’s quest becomes something symbolically fascinating when one focuses on these two scenes; what he ultimately finds himself coveting is money and a symbol of economic success, property.

Watching Wreck-It Ralph with this in mind leads to an intriguing reading of the film and as one looks deeper at a number of the characters and scenarios the similarities between them and the recent political and economic situations in America begin to pile up. ‘Average Joe’ Ralph’s plight is one that in many ways represents the modern American dream, a desire to break free from the monotony of a menial job that appears to have no reward or sense of satisfaction.

He dreams of financial success, which is in turn linked to property ownership, and the kind of celebrity worship that Felix enjoys (desire for celebrity worship has recently become an important part of the modern American Dream).

Ralph is eager to please the Nicelanders, the one-percenters, but also strives to be one of them and move out of the slum that he currently lives in. When the reality of Ralph’s situation and the class immovability that he faces becomes clear Ralph does what so many others in the real world do, he turns to therapy. He does not find solace here though, amongst a group of characters who have the exact same problems. This is a common anxiety that Ralph is experiencing, one that results from being repeatedly sold a false dream, an impossible dream that like Felix he can ‘win’ day after day.

Ralph looks further afield for answers and to try and fulfil his dreams. First he travels into Hero’s Duty, a game that involves a state of endless war, one that can never be won, a war waged against a constantly regenerating enemy. The enemy, which are referred to as bugs, are reminiscent of that great work of American allegory, Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. Echoes of the ‘War on Terror’, PTSD, and paranoia regarding ‘Homeland Security’ are strong in this sub-plot in Wreck-It Ralph and the way in which the bugs later invade the game world or Sugar Rush, not through a visible assault but by more covert means, hiding within the world waiting to strike speaks directly to American paranoia regarding foreign threats.

Sugar Rush is run by the less-than-benevolent King Candy, who on the surface appears jovial and rather harmless but actually resembles more of a dictator figure. A left wing reading of this character would certainly suggest that King Candy shares some similarity with the former president of America, George W. Bush. That King Candy is revealed to actually just be an older racing character (Turbo) reinforces this reading, with the character of Turbo standing in for the former president and father of George W. Bush, George Bush Snr.

King Candy even uses the electronic underpinning of the game world to rig the game to stop Vanellope – read Obama – from entering the race, and also suggest to others that she doesn’t even belong in the world of Sugar Rush. These scenes draw an interesting parallel with the controversies surrounding possible electoral fraud in Florida and spurious claims regarding Barack Obama’s birth certificate. A line dropped from the script in which King Candy comments on not wanting a “race riot” suggest that the film could have had even stronger leanings towards more risqué political content if it were not for a few of the wrinkles having been ironed out during production.

Vanellope ultimately triumphs though, thanks to Ralph defeating the foreign threat and the reveal of King Candy’s true nature, and despite having the option to be the same kind of royal that King Candy was Vanellope casts aside this prior regime and states that she wants Sugar Rush to be a true democracy. Significantly she also chooses to keep her glitches, those unique characteristics that led her to victory but may seem so worrisome to the more conservative residents of Sugar Rush.

Ralph returns to his game and although he doesn’t make it into the penthouse, he has realised that’s not what really matters. Amusingly though his dump has been transformed – shades of urban renewal – and he now lives in a new house. Whilst Vanellope may not be in charge of the world of Fix-It Felix Jr. it would appear that the new administration and a shift in attitudes is having a positive effect on Ralph’s life. Whilst Ralph’s life may not have actually significantly improved, the future is now a little brighter and the glimpses he gets at Vanellope winning the hearts of her world and beyond give him hope.

The film is fascinating in the questions it raises about nature vs. nurture. Do you find yourself coming down more on one side of that debate and did making Chained change your views at all or lead you in new directions?

Such a great question. I think the dangerous part of nurture vs. nature is the assumption that it is one or the other. It is so deeply case specific. If we look solely at Bob and Rabbit… Bob’s nurture was so damaging, it built a monster. He knew only pain and deception. Mistrust and fear were his first words. Intimacy was ruined and sex mixed with violence. Yet…clearly, he yearns to have companionship and to not be alone. He cannot be rehabilitated, but there is still a deep ingrained human need in him to be loved. Rabbit had love from his mother for nine years. Then the damage occurred. I like to think the knowledge of what love truly feels like enabled him to save his own life and the life of Angie, yet…what will happen to him now? He has been broken. No matter how good his intentions… can he ever recover?

I understand that when you first read the script for Chained you found some of the ‘torture porn’ elements to be gratuitous. What do you consider to be the definition of torture porn and in what way did you find them gratuitous in the first version of the script?

Damien O’Donnell wrote a powerful script, No two ways about it. But it was not a movie for me. I felt I had seen a lot of it before, in that there was a large B story in which detectives searched for the killer throughout, and yes, the killer, who was simply called, THE DICER, was unappealing to me in that he killed by torture. I didn’t know why. I felt unmoved. I felt disconnected. I felt the women were made simple and victimized even before he got to them. Torture porn has a large audience and many folks are great at telling those stories. I’m not one of them. I wanted to explore the idea of a REAL HUMAN MONSTER. How are they made? The idea that something as “every day” and “seemingly safe” as a taxi ride could become threatening… that the pain we all experience guides us in our decision making each day…making us either less or more empathetic.. that’s what’s scary and fascinating. I love scary movies, but I wanted to deal with the monster who doesn’t wear a mask. He stands next to you at the grocery store, and you don’t know how dangerous he is.

How important to you was it to not provide concrete answers in Chained? There are threads that seem to be left loose to encourage audiences to question what they’ve seen and think about the characters’ behaviour. Was this a very conscious consideration and if so, was there anything in particular you did to ensure the film played in this way?

I love a bit of uncertainty at the end of things. It allows for dialogue and audience involvement after the movie. Its intentional on my part and deeply important to me. In the same way I treated the last shot of SURVEILLANCE, I adore the different views on what might become of someone who has survived such things. What happens next. Will the love they knew once be the thing that echoes, or will the violence be too loud? I think that pain is so (as I said above) case specific, it is not for me to say what happens next. It is for all of us to discuss. There really is no excusing the violence Bob imparts, but there is a way to understand it. But we built him. If we can save children from abusive situations, we can begin to end the cycle of the abused becoming abusers. Until then, our silence and hands in our pockets, only keep the monsters coming.

The sounds of Rabbit in the house over the end credits were really important to me. He returns to the only home he has now. He does what he knows. But in my opinion Angie is fine. Next stop, IKEA.

I read in another interview that you would like to do a director’s cut of Chained. What would be different in that cut of the film and do you have any plans to release that at any point?

I would adore to do a director’s cut. I was limited by a running time requirement and had to lose some things I loved. There was a scene as well that I lost due to feelings the distributors had about it. I miss it terribly. The ending was cut significantly enough that Jake Weber told me he was a bit heart broken to see what was missing from that final scene with Rabbit. If there is any way I can raise some money, or if enough people want to see a directors cut…I’M READY.

What was the hardest scene to cut from the film and why?

There were a few. All hurt. But that’s part of the process. A film is made three times. It is written. It is shot. It is cut. So much happens in each stage. I’d say the scene I vaguely referenced in the prior question was the hardest. I don’t want to give away what it was, but I dig the hell out of it. Second in line was the continuation of the “card game” with driver’s licenses that Bob and Rabbit play. There was a round improved at 3 a.m…. amazing. Hysterical. Telling. It just ran too long and had to go. But in a director’s cut…that sucker would be in!!!

So much of the film is incredibly tense and often very uncomfortable to watch. How did you find shooting these kind of scenes and did you do anything in particular to help bring out more emotionally deep performances from the actors?

Every actor involved was so brave and so trusting of me, I had only to make certain I returned that gift. I is imperative that they know they can trust me. That I am not going to make light of what they are doing and how much work it is. I will push them, yes. But I will always be there to catch them. I think discussions are incredibly important. They bring up different feeling in each actor and then are released on the screen. I enjoy blocking and making certain lines are run… but I DO NOT REHEARSE. I think each actual performance should be filmed. Actors are collaborators. They are artists, not puppets. I never want to say..” okay…great…but can you do what you did in that rehearsal (I was too stupid to film)?

How did you find shooting on the RED One and the Alexa? What strengths and/or weaknesses do you thinking shooting on digital had and were there any particular benefits that you found for this film in particular? Do you think you’ll ever shoot on film again?

I love film. I love digital. The Alexa is amazing. The Red is a great camera as well. I also love my Canon Rebel. They are like boyfriends, cameras. Each has something to offer. Some you take home, others you take downtown. I believe I will shoot on film again, certainly, but I have to say I am truly cherishing digital right now. It is not film. It is what it is, and it evolves every day. Most important to me, it allows me to keep the set quiet at the end of a take… to not break the mood… to keep the actors protected in character, but to whisper, ‘still rolling…that was beautiful…let’s go again right now…this time imagine you are afraid he/she will laugh at what you say next’ I can experiment. I do not worry about burning film. I have the actor’s back, and the camera has mine.

One advantage of digital is that you can see what’s just been shot immediately. Did the actors in Chained watch their takes during filming and if so, what effect do you think this had on the actors’ performances?

Neither the actors nor I would watch the takes after we shot them. Maybe once I would show them a playback of something beautiful…some incredible moment.. but again… I have found that watching it takes me out of the creation. I felt the actors felt the same way. I watch footage later. In the moment I keep shooting. Unless I see something go wrong or the cinematographer says we need to go again for camera… I shoot on mood. I think everyone knows when it works.

How did you find the arbitration process with the MPAA that you went through with Chained and what are your personal views about the censorship & classification of films?

Wow. The MPAA. Yeah. Hmmmm. The arbitration was surprisingly pleasant for a situation that didn’t go my way. I believe the people involved are doing what the guidelines set forth for them to do. I simply do not agree with the guidelines. Ultimately what they kept saying was, “It just feels to real” “You have made a great film…we don’t think children should ever see it” Touche’. I mean, hey…neither do I. This is not a kid’s movie… but to say that a sixteen year old cannot go with a parent or discerning adult and after the movie have a dialogue about abuse and safety and the horror of actual violence… is absurd to me. The concept that violence that is sexualized or made funny is better for those 17 and under is grotesque. It is numbing. I love those films for what they are, truly… but we are setting our youth up for a surprise if they think throat slitting is funny or sexy. I can’t help but think that if Brad Pitt played BOB, I would have had an R. But almost proudly I say… Vincent, Eamon, Julia and Jake and Evan (et al) all did such an authentic job… It meant the MPAA was going to have to actually approve intelligent conversations between children and adults. I wish they would have.

I understand your next film is going to be A Fall From Grace. What stage are you currently at with that and what can you tell us about the story? And are you still intending to follow it up with The Monster Next Door?

A Fall From Grace is in the final and delicate stages of casting. I hope to be in pre production by March… fingers crossed. It is all such a beautiful and awkward ballet, this film business. One never knows how it will unfold, only that with passion, eventually, it will.

The Monster Next Door is indeed slated to follow AFFG. I cannot wait!

This interview was originally posted at HeyUGuys.

There is a depressing inevitably in her next career move, her almost passive acceptance of it makes it even more so, as Tome begins working at a local brothel. Tome adapts and survives though and raises above the other women, ultimately working as a madam, securing customers for prostitutes and taking a substantial cut in the process. Resilient and resourceful she is a classic Imamuran woman, but the harsh treatment she so often receives, the ugly view of human life and the stark inevitability of the story is evidence that this is also classic Imamura in many other ways.

The sense that all this has happened before and will of course happen again pushes down on the story, a story already crushed from all sides by the claustrophobia of a character trapped in her circumstances. The tight, on location cinematography adds to this oppression, with Imamura often shooting inside with low ceilings and close walls closing in from all sides.

The film deals with issues beyond Tome’s confined life though and it is undoubtedly no coincidence that her life moves from pre-war Japan, skipping quickly through World War II and then onto the post-war period. The repetition common through all of Insect Woman, most notable in a repeated shot from inside a barn, and the sense that nothing is really changing reflects a bleak outlook that was not perhaps an uncommon one in post-war Japan. There is a glimmer of something approaching hope though in the film’s final moments, as Tome injures her foot on a rock only to continue on. As this moment and in a way, the rest of the film suggests, obstacles will constantly be placed in the way but it is through an almost animalistic resilience and will to survive that these can be moved past.

Much like Masters of Cinema’s release of Imamura’s Pigs and Battleships, which included his first feature Stolen Desire, the MoC release of comes complete with Imamura’s second feature, the delightfully whimsical Nishi Ginza Station. Designed as something of a vehicle for lounge singer Frank Nagai, Nishi Ginza Stationis just over 60 minutes and very much a lightweight B picture but a very enjoyable one. Clearly riffing onThe Seven Year Itch, the number of similarities are almost too numerous to list, the film concerns a henpecked husband who runs a pharmacy, has two children and a reasonably stable family life but dreams of escaping to a tropical island and the delights of Sally, a grass skirted native who lives there – cue some pretty unfortunate but entirely of the time attitudes to race.

In a way he gets his fantasy, or at least something close to it, but the film ends on a reconciliation and a re-establishment of conservative family values, albeit with a sense that nothing has really changed. This latter point may be the closest the film gets to the kind material Imamura dealt with in his later career. But casting aside the desire to see the film framed within Imamura’s filmography one finds a rather frothy but entirely enjoyable comedy with just a little bite. Not exactly a revelation, Nishi Ginza Stationis nonetheless a rare treat and a wonderful sweet one after the rather difficult and heady ‘pleasures’ of Insect Woman.

This review was originally posted at Bleeding Cool.

Le Silence de la mer is a real treat, both as a standalone experience and also particularly for anyone familiar with and interested in Melville’s body of work. Le Silence de la mer was a film that so easily could have never been seen, with Melville taking a huge gamble in making the film without the consent of author Bruller and agreeing only to release it if it gained the approval of a specially selected jury of resistance members. The film thankfully passed the test and Bruller gave Melville his blessing to release it in 1949.

Telling the story of a German officer (Howard Vernon) who is thrust upon a French unnamed man (Jean-Marie Robain) and his niece (Nicole Stéphane), and uses their home as his home, Le Silence de la mer is a difficult balancing act and one that must have been even trickier and all the more sensitive just a few years after the end of World War Two. Whilst the German officer, Werner von Ebrennac, talks at length throughout the film, the French uncle and niece remain completely silent, their opinions and thoughts only relayed through the voiceover from Jean-Marie Robain, the niece significantly having no such platform.

Von Ebrennac is cultured and intelligent, sympathetic and idealistic and during his many monologues he reveals his dreams of uniting France and Germany, and indeed all of Europe, believing that this is the war that he is fighting for. The ugly truth of the Nazi agenda is revealed to him though, in a rather heartbreaking scene, and the film ends with the French man finally communicating to von Ebrennac, albeit not verbally, that accepting the truth of the Nazi occupation and continuing to follow orders should not be his future. The silent and stubborn integrity that von Ebrennac witnesses in the French home clearly has an impact on him and the film is all the more emotionally resonant due to the complex journey that von Ebrennac goes on throughout the film.

Melville presents a complex and intelligent argument about war and resistance in a film that is both icily still and intellectual but also quietly very emotional.

This review was originally posted at Bleeding Cool.

There’s a lot to Silent Running in the technology, the story and the ecological message. What first got you excited about making the film?

When I was initially thinking about doing any film I inadvertently came across Tod Browning’s movie The Freaks and there was an amazing character played by Johnny Eck, who could walk on his hands. That was the beginning of an idea for creating an amazing robotic character that people wouldn’t be able to figure out very easily. I’d always been bored by men in robot outfits.

So I was beginning to think about how a movie might incorporate that so I wrote various treatments and ended up writing a treatment for Silent Running which was seen by a friend of mine who was an agent. And some other people at Universal Studios who were very open to experimenting with some new film forms, because of the advent of Easy Rider which had made a huge amount of money as an independent film. I don’t know how much you know about that story…

They gave you one million dollars, right…

We had only one million dollars to make a movie and they would not intervene in any way, they would not look at dailies, it was a complete sociological experiment on behalf of the management of Universal Studios. There were five films made, each for about a million dollars, and Silent Running was part of the package.

The main thing was just to be able to make a film at all. A science fiction film that would have some kind of heart and soul to it rather than being a repellent science movie with a lot of characters that are de-humanized. To try and combine those two factors and do it at a very low price. And do some amazing visual effects. I’d come off 2001, which took a very long time and cost a huge amount of money and was very complicated and I was trying to figure out if it was possible to make a very low budget movie that had some of those qualities.

For instance, the front projection system that Kubrick used on 2001 for the dawn of man sequence, and a couple of other shots, was very cumbersome and difficult and challenging and heavy but I knew the principle of it so I worked with an engineer in LA and we designed a very portable front projection machine that allowed us to do some pretty amazing shots in Silent Running at very low cost, very quickly and with a very small crew. And that was one of the enabling technologies that I developed forSilent Running. Just to make it comfortable and easy to make a sci-fi movie for a low budget with a small crew.

You’ve built a studio too or are you still building it?

I’ve actually built a studio here at my home.

And the aim is to do a similar thing, to make the process of making a film leaner?

Yes, exactly. There are several components to it. You have to start with my current belief that the motion picture production industry is in serious jeopardy because I don’t think it’s a sustainable business model for films to cost $200 million a piece or more. Secondly I thought Avatar was fantastic and a major breakthrough movie. And it was an extremely technologically driven movie that completely disassembled the entire process of what it is to make a movie, shooting on a virtual stage, shooting virtual characters and avatars. It was hugely expensive because that was the first time out but at the same time doing the movie in 3D made that big 3D breakthrough and that movie became the highest grossing movie of all time.

So I figured that’s what the audience wants to see, you can see that 75% of world box office gross comes from these kinds of spectacle movies. So I felt that if I can do the same thing that I did post 2001, which was to figure out how to do a movie like that for a lot less money, it would be a kind of no-brainer business opportunity. So that was one aspect of it.

I’ve been developing what I call virtual set, virtual location technology. The way Hollywood does things is to build big sets on big stages and they have large crews and they go location with twenty trucks and large crews. I think that since we can superimpose anybody into anything, blue screen or green screen, instantaneously and at extremely low cost then it would be reasonable to experiment with movies that had no sets and no locations. Doing it all virtually.

I’ve developed a camera technology where the camera is encoded with motion capture data so that a real time computer knows exactly where the camera is so you pan, tilt, dolly around with what I call my zero-gravity crane on a stage. And we have 180-degree panoramic green screen and our automated lighting rig so we can photograph actors superimposed into a virtual environment instantaneously and in real-time. So it allows us to actually do rehearsals very in-expensively, we can rehearse the entire feature film in three or four days, cut it together and do what I call a live action animatic.

So you see an issue not just with the technology and the automation but also in the process of pre-production, production and so on?

Yeah, I think the closer you can get to allowing and enabling the actors and the director to work very closely together towards perfecting a performance, the drama, the dialogue and the blocking, the better off you are. And it’s been shown that in the animation business, particularly at Pixar and a lot of the public presentations that Ed Catmull [current president of Walt Disney & Pixar Animation studios] has made for instance, that the process of animatics and pre-visualisation is vitally important to de-bugging a movie before it actually goes into production. They do that regularly at all animation studios so they can see the whole film at a very early stage before they actually render anything. They cut together their storyboards, they cut together animatics, they cut together illustrations and kind of de-bug the movie at a very early stage and they go through that three, four times during pre-production.

So a lot of time you end up actually shooting your principal actors in the principal sets and locations, which in my case are virtual. You know exactly what you need, you can shoot it very quickly, you can shoot a hundred or more set-ups a day and it looks fantastic. And I go one step more which is just to replace the computer graphic backgrounds with miniatures which in my opinion look much much better than any computer graphics environment, and are actually much less expensive.

You’ve also been at the forefront of pushing higher frame rates…

Yeah, that’s the other thing I was mentioning. I think one of the problems with the movie industry right now is that the way films are presented in cinemas is very substandard. First of all the theatres themselves are just boxes with a screen at the end and seats. There’s no showmanship, no curtains, no anything going on that’s dramatic or theatrical like you would experience if you went to a live performance in a dramatic theatre or went to Circ du Soleil or the circus or a live rock ‘n’ roll show. There’s no showmanship in movie theatres. Secondly they project the movies at never brighter than 15 foot-lamberts of brightness, which is much less than you see on your home television sets which is usually 50 or more foot-lamberts of brightness.

So the colour saturation is low, the frame-rate is low, the screen is relatively small, it’s rectangular and usually flat. So there’s nothing close to the days when I grew up with movies where we had Cinerama and deeply curved 90-foot wide screens and you could create a kind of spectacle, event movie which is where I started with 2001. That’s all pretty much gone. It’s alive to a certain extent in IMAX theatres but even IMAX has converted now to 2K digital projectors on smaller screens. So not anywhere in the industry is there a kind of spectacular exhibition format. Then you have the additional problem of 3D projection which reduces the brightness to an average of 2.5 foot-lamberts, which is way way too dim to create any sense of spectacle. It creates a lot of eye-strain and a lot of problems with brightness, so you see very little colour saturation, very little contrast, you’re seeing a really sub-standard image.

Then you have 24 frames-per-second, which has been the standard in the industry for ever, since talking movies came in, which has been revealed to the professionals in the industry to be inadequate for 3D because the blurring and strobing that happens at 24fps really disturbs a clear perception of 3D. So they have to slow down the action and try and keep it from blurring and strobing to hold the 3D image together. The result is that Peter Jackson is now shooting The Hobbit in 3D at 48fps, Jim Cameron is planning to shoot Avatar 2 and 3 at 60fps, if not 48. That’ll be an improvement but the next thing we need is even wider, bigger screens and more powerful projectors.

If we got to a point where it was 100fps or even 72, with good 3D projection, 9.1 sound, 8K presentations, then what do you think is next, is there a next leap?

I’m not really worried about a next leap beyond that. Because getting to that is all we can do in the next few years. I’m shooting films right now at 120fps in 3D and I know that the result is absolutely stunning but very few people on this planet have actually seen that, yet. I have a very challenging process ahead of me to start demonstrating this and doing at least one film that I want to make. I have several films lined up but I’ve got one in particular that would lend itself to this. It’s a big space adventure movie. And I’ve got to make the movie and show it in this process and convince people that there’s a very big audience that wants to see this kind of tremendous technological, creative, visual leap forward to much higher quality. I don’t see right now any visible advantage to go even higher than 120 frames, I think that’s about as much as the human eye can absorb, but combining 120 frames and high brightness and gain screens that are very wide and large with a different seating configuration is a huge epic change that will take some time to effect. But I’m working on it.

You mentioned a space adventure film. I’ve read that you have two scripts in particular that you’re working on and that they have an ecological bent, is that right?

Well, not so much an ecological bent as much as a survival bent. Having to do with reaching for the stars and why we would have to go to the stars. Are we using up this planet at such an exponential rate with population growth and depletion of the resources that we’re going to have to leave the earth. I was just at a symposium in Florida last month called ‘The One-Hundred Year Starship Symposium’ that was sponsored by DARPA and there were a lot of very interesting speakers there and a lot of talk about a very big issue that faces humanity. Which is, how are we going to survive and where are we going to go when we use this place up. Those issues are part of the underpinnings of some of the movies I’m working on.

You worked on Tree of Life obviously but what in modern sci-films have you seen that you’ve liked, have you seen Duncan Jones’ Moon for instance?

I’ve seen Moon. I was frankly disappointed with it. I didn’t think there was enough going on and I didn’t think the effects were as good as they could have been. I thought it was a really good first effort and an admirable movie but it just wasn’t enough to make it, enough action and dynamism as I would like to see in a movie. But a move in the right direction.

I mean I wouldn’t call Tree of Life a science-fiction movie at all, it’s a completely different animal. I think it was a very brave and courageous movie to make that really gets people thinking and its very beautiful but it would be better to see a movie like that in IMAX or some more powerful medium because I think that the imagery of space is incredibly beautiful and I think creating a kind of public consciousness about the universe and space is a very important thing right now.

In the UK there’s a bit of a movement pushing science a bit more with people like Brian Cox on television talking about space, science and the Large Hadron Collider. I think people still don’t appreciate science enough though at the moment. Do you think there’s a lack of that too?

Well I think it requires a very high bandwith medium to get people immersed in the experience of it. Presently with our medium, which is basically movies or high definition television, if you see a documentary or something about a scientific effort or the Collider or whatever it’s not powerful enough to really move you internally and that’s why I want to try and get back and get to even better than my experience forty years ago with 2001 on a giant Cinerama screen, where a transition takes place where you don’t to anymore need to resort to traditional cinematic form, you get to something that becomes a direct first person experience for the audience. That goes beyond story, drama and conflict, it goes into something that the audience can directly absorb. That’s a territory that very few people are even thinking about right now.

I never got a chance to go on the Back to the Future ride that you worked on but looking at Brainstorm I can see that first person approach and it’s not an area that people seem to be exploring now.

I think Jim Cameron is probably moving more in that area than anyone because I think he’s recognised that a lot of the appeal of Avatar is that people feel that they’ve been transported to another dimension or another world in some way. That seems to be one of the things that a lot of people write about, the 3D brings a kind of immersiveness to it. Even though there is all these limitations that he is trying to overcome with the next versions. Yeah, I’m going there. I’m definitely working on it but I know that the medium has to get a lot better in order to do it. It kind of puts me outside of the mainstream and I work more with people in the flight simulation industry than I do with people in the movie industry. Trying to recreate reality, it’s a whole other artform.

Do you see a future where you’ll be moving in the cinema as well then?

Possibly, I’m not so concerned with physically moving because that’s such a costly high maintenance thing to build simulation rides with hydraulic actuators. I’ve done that before and I’ve had a lot of success with it. People seem to really enjoy it but that’s only appropriate for something that’s four or six minutes long. You can’t just do that to people for an hour and a half. On the other hand I think the immersiveness of the medium itself can be very much improved and there’s plenty of room for improvement and fortunately right now it’s all doable with almost off the shelf equipment. I mean there’s high speed cameras, there’s high speed projectors, there’s high bandwidth data storage. All the stuff I’m doing now I can purchase so it’s not that hard to get there. I didn’t have to invent anything new to do what I’m doing.

There have obviously been filmmakers such as Gareth Edwards with Monsters and Neill Blomkamp with District 9 where people with an effects background moved into directing. It does seem almost easier now than it did some time ago.

Oh yeah, tremendously easier.

How did you find that transition and how do you see that difference now?

I found the transition quite easy. My experience became one of discovering that the directing part of it is the easiest part of it. That it didn’t take me long to learn about screen direction or working with actors and that it became a very straightforward process. The real challenge has been to make the breakthroughs to bring a more powerful medium to the screen and that’s why it was such a profound life-changing disappointment to me when I couldn’t get anyone to make Brainstorm in Showscan, which was my plan. And if Brainstorm had been made in Showscan and Natalie Wood had not died I think it would have been quite a disruptive, revolutionary step forward for movies.

It just didn’t happen at that time and I’m hoping that there’s a confluence of energies right now that have made it possible because digital technology is so inexpensive. We don’t have to pay for gigantic film prints in 70mm and huge projectors and big cans of film and lab cost. It’s all very easy and inexpensive to do. There’s no reason why we can’t make some big leaps forward right now.

The technology is of course so important to filmmaking and there does seem to be more attention being paid to it recently but do you think that people need to be more informed?

I think they need to much more technologically informed and from my experiences they are still not very well informed. Actors are not informed, few directors are informed, even the cinematographers are still as informed as they could be and it’s a big uphill battle to make any change. I think there’s a huge amount of inertia in the motion picture industry to keep things the same as they always have been because people find it very threatening to embrace change or to do things differently than they’ve done all their life. It’s always a hard struggle.

This interview was originally posted at Bleeding Cool.

Stray penises and politicos

David Simon takes a look at a recent unseemly journalistic trend.

Louise Brooks And Me

Anne Billson blogs about ‘The Girl with the Black Helmet’.

Ludivine Sagnier: ‘I got frightened and shut down’

An interview with the wonderful French actress on the occasion of the UK release of Love Crime.

My Empire of Hatred

It would appear that I’m not the only one that dislikes the direction that Empire Magazine has moved in and wishes that it was be a lot better.

How Do You Pronounce Quvenzhané

Armond White reviews Beasts of the Southern Wild and, perhaps unsurprisingly, has some issues with the film’s racial politics.

Why Indomina Abandoned Distribution

Anne Thompson looks into why Indomina abandoned distribution this week.

Netflix vs. LoveFilm

Techcrunch break down the number of TV shows and films currently on Netflix and LoveFilm.

Quentin Tarantino Interview Part 1: Django Unchained Trilogy and More

Quentin Tarantino Interview Part 2: On the N-Word

Quentin Tarantino Interview Part 3: White Saviors

Terry Zwigoff Talks Battling Over ‘Bad Santa,’ His Preferred Director’s Cut & Much More In Candid Interview

Lots of great information from Zwigoff in this interview at The Playlist. Including, shockingly, some gripes about the Weinsteins.

Patton Oswalt’s favorite pop culture of 2012, from The Queen Of Versailles to Sklarbro Country

Patton Oswalt’s got really great taste and here’s an excellent list of what he was digging in 2012.

At the time the casting of Two-Lane Blacktop was somewhat unconvential. Could you talk a little about how you came to choose the particular actors you used, specifically James Taylor and Laurie Bird.

Well, I think that James was probably the first one to be cast and I had been intervieweing just about every  young actor in Hollywood and I didn’t find anyone that really struck me. I saw James’ photo on a billboard on the Sunset Strip and I was interested in his face and I asked our casting director Fred Roos if it would be possible to meet with him. He came in and that was it. I was convinced but we actually had to convince the studio at the time, which was not the studio that ultimately made the movie, and so we shot a screen test and everybody was thrilled with that and he was cast.

And then Laurie Bird was someone I had met when I went to New York and met with Rudy Wurlitzer and we were struck by some qualities that she had as a person that we thought were simiilar to the character that we were developing in the script. And so we spent two or three hours doing an audio interview with her and that was the basis for a lot of what went into the script for the character. Later on when I couldn’t find anyone to play the part someone had the bright idea to consider the girl that was the prototype, and that’s what happened.

Their screen tests are on the new Blu-ray and they’re quite intriguing to watch. Were they shot mostly just for the studio?

Yes, they were shot for the purpose of convincing the studio.

In Road to Nowhere the fictional director comments that casting is 90% of directing. Is that something you believe in?

Yeah, I would probably make it 95. [Laughs]

I think it’s something that I actually teach my students. I was looking at some scenes from students yesterday and somebody had a very successful scene because of the fact that they had found just the right actor. Also, it’s something I use to include not just the actors but the locations, they’re are part of the casting process.

You’ve had many strong female leads in your films, including Millie Perkins in your westerns and Cockfighter and Jenny Agutter in China 9, Liberty 37. How did you come to work with those actresses?

Millie Perkins was my next door neighbour and Jenny Agutter, I’m not quite sure how we came to her but when you go through a casting process on a picture that’s ready to be made you sometimes don’t have quite as much time as if you have a few more months to plan. People start throwing out ideas and one of them clicks and that’s what happens. You wind up with that terrific actor.

China 9, Liberty 37 to me feels more romantic than your other films. Is that something you would agree with?

Yes, I think it is more romantic than some of my other movies but I think that I tend to have a romantic outlook. I tend to like romantic movies. I think that may be more overtly romantic but I think some of the others are too, I think Two-Lane Blacktop is very romantic too.

I think so too but where specifically do you see the romance in Two-Lane Blacktop?

For me Two-Lane Blacktop was my way to do a version of Shoot the Piano Player and it’s really a story about a character whose tragic flaw is the inability to communicate and it’s all about his inability to communicate his romantic feelings that I think leads to his disappointment in the movie.

Do you yourself see the ending as a downbeat ending?

No, I think the ending is a way to stop the movie as opposed to a way to end it because unless you end with marriage or death [chuckles] there are no other endings in movies. So we just stooped the movie, we don’t end it.

I’m a big fan of the two movies you made in the Phillipines. There are a couple of lines in them that I particularly like, “Death is a punctuation” in Flight to Fury and there’s one in Back Door to Hell about how we’re all going to “die anyway, today, tomorrow, thirty years from now”.

[Laughs] I didn’t write either of those so I guess they’re the sentiments of Jack Nicholson and John Hackett.

Is that something that you liked about the scripts though. There’s a sense of fatalism to them, is that something that appealed?

I enjoy, y’know, a slight diversion towards philosophical discussion just as I do in life but I don’t really concentrate on that in my movies. It’s just part of the characters.

I think there’s a real end of era feeling to Two-Lane Blacktop. Do you feel that about it and did you get that sense at the time at all?

When you’re in any given time frame I don’t think we think ‘oh, this is 1989 the end of decade’, it’s just another year and more accurately it’s just another day, that’s all.

Do you see it looking back though?

I don’t really. I mean it’s easy to say that the sixties had a certain personality or something. I think there’s a certain truth to it though, London in the sixties was, using a term we would use in my classes in Stanford, a dynamic place to be at that time. And at other times Los Angeles has been the most dynamic place, at least in America, perhaps in the world. Things happen faster in certain places and at certain times but to say, okay this is a ten year period that happens to match the passing of a decade is possibly stretching it.

In a more general sense I suppose I’m getting at, was there a sense of a change coming or change happening?

Again something you’re not aware of at the time but looking back I would say that the time we made Two Lane Blacktop was certainly a stimulating time to be making movies, at least in Hollywood. We may never have that much freedom to make such unusual movies as we did at that time.

I spoke recently with Douglas Trumbull and he echoed those sentiments but also talked about recent changes in technology. I understand that’s something that you’re also interested in. Road to Nowhere was shot on Canon 5Ds, for instance. Do you find digital filmmaking liberating?

I’m an early adopter and I took to digital still photography very early on. I was appreciative of not having to breathe all those chemicals in the dark-room and I also appreciated the greater control you have, it’s much easier to manipulate the image than to have to kind of wave your hand in a funny way [laughs]. I like it a lot and I feel the same way about digital movies, it’s much greater control, you have greater control over the colour, it’s a more permanent control. In the lab you may have one batch that comes out good and then the next batch might be a slightly different part of the process in terms of the first film that goes through a new batch of chemicals being different from the last batch that went through before they changed the chemicals. There are so many variables in that system and it’s much more specific in the digital world.

I did used to love the dark-room though for the tactile nature of it though, is there anything about that which you miss?

I don’t miss that but I do miss handling the film. I used to work with an upright moviola and I do miss that, that was a very tactile experience and a much more physically active than just pushing buttons on a computer.

You’ve obviously had a lot of work as an editor on your own projects and other peoples. Is there one part that you prefer, the editing, the directing or the writing?

Having come originally from the theatre where part of the director’s job is not only coaxing a performance out of the players but also controlling the timing and so on, that’s two things and the editing is the equivalent of the second part, so I consider it a continuation of the directing.

Some directors and editors often say that the film is really made in the editing room. Do you feel that that’s the case or that a lot of it is on the page?

There’s no easy answer to that. Yes, there are some films that you’ve edited in your head and they just go together and other films become completely different in the process. I would say that Road to Nowhere was film that was drastically altered in the editing process.

Do you tend to storyboard beforehand?

I only storyboard when I’m forced to, which is when I’m doing special effects. So when I was doing all the miniatures for Avalanche Express, all the avalanche itself and the minature trains and so forth, that all needed to be storyboarded but if I don’t need to do it I don’t do it.

You made a diagram for Two-Lane Blacktop to proof a point too, is that correct?

Yeah, I did an overhead view looking down on the car and showing all the different positions the camera could have. It would give us that many perspectives and I used that when I went to MGM to try to convince them to finance the movie.

Do you still have the diagram?

No, I don’t. I wish I did [laughs].

Me too, I’d love to see it as I’m sure a lot of film fans would. You shot second unit on a few films too including Robocop. Did you need to do storyboards for that?

I didn’t do storyboards but Paul Verhoeven did storyboards. He didn’t like the idea of having a second unit director, I must say I don’t either if it happens to me, so he wanted to maintain his control over it as much as he could so he would give me storyboards everyday to dictate how I would shoot the scenes.

I’ve read that you shot second unit on The Big Red One too, is that true?

No, that’s one of those strange IMDB fantasies I guess, they have me down for a number of things that I had nothing to do with.

As a teacher is there one thing that you think is most important to teach your students or is there one thing that you think that you’re imparting to them that is the most use?

I basically, as much as I can, teach philosophy of filmmaking as much as any of the technique. I do a little bit of each. The rules, the grammar of filmmaking are so simple that you can teach them in about twenty minutes but it takes a lot longer to learn so sometimes we have to reinforce those lessons over and over again to get them across. It’s pretty simple stuff. I teach a basic philosophy though that’s based on a kind of mentor of mine, not someone I actually met but someone whose books I read, and that’s Artur Hopkins. It’s really again quite simple stuff, that we are at the service of the material that we are doing and that the job of the director is primarily to convince everyone of that. To make everyone part of this team working together and not to try and call attention to ourselves individually. It’s a little bit about being selfless and essentially the idea that anything that calls attention to a person or a technique is detrimental. That if you notice the music or if you notice the cinematography or if you notice the direction then you can be sure that it’s bad.

How do you feel generally about ‘breaking the forth wall’, so to speak, because in Road to Nowhere there’s an interesting game played with that?

Well it’s against everything I was ever taught, against everything I believe and what was amazing to me was how quickly the audience begins to believe again. We shake them up and knock them out of the movie and they come back within seconds and I think it has to do with our wanting to believe, when we go into that theatre, into that dark room, we want to suspend our disbelief and we want to be wrapped up in this story that we’re asked to participate in. It’s so powerful and I think that’s one of the big revelations for me and I think seeing how quickly the audience came back.

Just to return briefly to Two-Lane Blacktop, I understand there were scenes that were cut that no longer exist. Could you talk a little about these?

Well, the script turned out to be a very long screenplay. We shot most of it and we wound up with a three and a half hour first cut and we were contractually obligated to deliver a movie under two hours. We wound up with a movie that was actually an hour and three quarters. So we threw away half the movie [laughs] and yes there were some wonderful scenes. There was one scene in particular where they’re evading a cop car that’s trying to catch them and they pull into a residential neighbourhood and pull into the driveway and the cop car never shows up. They get out of their car and they look through the window at this house and they see a family of a man and a woman and their two children having dinner. There’s nothing said but there’s a kind of nostalgia about their sense of what they’ve left behind and the life they’re living now.

Is there any sense do you think that they want to recapture that kind of a family unit?

I don’t know, whenever you move on to another stage of your life there’s always a possibility that you’ll feel nostalgia for what you’ve left behind but at the same time that doesn’t mean that you’d necessarily like to go back to it.

The road as well is a powerful symbol of abandoning something, a lot of films have used it as symbol in this way. Do you see the road as having a potential for giving up on a a past life? What do you see as the symbolic potential of the road?

I think the road is what you perceive it is or what you wish it to be. It can be many things. To me the road is really a way to ground a movie in real life. One of my other mentors was Siegfried Kracauer who wrote a book called ‘Theory of Film’ in which he basically says that if you shoot a movie in a room without windows then it’s not really a movie because it doesn’t have any connection to the street or to life itself. But if you have a window and you see out into the world… and one of the trademarks of Darryl Zanuck is that he would have just that, he would have a window or an open doorway in every scene in his movies, even though he wasn’t the director, and there would be all this teeming life going on outside in the world and that made it a much more powerful movie.

In Road to Nowhere Mitchell Haven sees the world through the prism of films, his window into the world seems to be through film, Lady Eve and The Seventh Seal for instance. That seems to shape how he perceives the world. As something of a cine-nut myself I could empathise with that. Do you see the world through films, do they open your mind in that way?

I don’t know if I see the world through films but I think in Road to Nowhere he uses film as a way to connect to his love. He wants her to experience the emotions that he felt with these movies and in that way bond more closely with her. I think that he equally sees film through the real world, in other words he tries to represent reality with his cinema and that’s his attraction to a real life crime story that he becomes so in love.

I really enjoyed Road to Nowhere and am so happy to see you making films again. Is there anything next on the horizon?

We’ve got three projects now, two that Steve Gaydos has, one is a script that he’s already written called Rattlesnake Shakedown and another is a book that he’s just optioned by Herbert Gold called The Man Who Was Not With It and there’s a third project that I’ve had for a number of years called Love or Die which may be my next one. Whichever one comes together faster is the one that we’ll do, the one that we raise the money for.

This interview was originally posted at Bleeding Cool.

Furthermore, the veracity of what we are seeing on screen is always in question. This isn’t strictly a documentary, this is obvious from the beginning, but there do appear to be facts behind and within the film but these are constantly mixed with liberal additions of fiction and fabrication.

Throughout the first half of the film we are introduced to everyone in Oshima’s life, the details of his and their lives slowly uncovered through interviews. The interviews focus mainly on relatively mundane details and despite the cumulative result being somewhat effective in building a picture this part of the film does drag considerably. Also, as one is very quickly more than aware that all may not be as it seems there is certainly an issue inherent in telling an audience a series of not particularly interesting facts over the course of an hour that are almost certainly not facts. It’s hard to invest too much in what is being said when you are constantly wondering if the some of what you are being told is simply a lie.

The film picks up pace and comes alive somewhat in the second half as Oshima’s girlfriend takes centre stage and the fabrication, the defining characteristic of this film, becomes more and more apparent. The film also has a wonderful ending in which tension builds and builds during a heated argument until Imamura pulls a wonderful cinematic trick and events spin off towards a reasonably logical conclusion.

The film was co-produced by the Art Theatre Guild (the first film that they funded) but released by the major studio Nikkatsu in 1967. The original intention was to investigate the disappearance of 26 men (or 24 – depending on the source) and possibly to even turn this into a multi-part television series. Given this wider scope it is easy to see how this could have built into a rather fascinating project. As it stands though A Man Vanishes is an oddity, an interesting experiment built on a fascinating idea but it is a conceptual work that is far more interesting to consider or discuss with others than it is to watch.

This review was originally posted at Bleeding Cool.

With Bullet to the Head, Hill has found himself in a much safer area of filmmaking and jumps aboard the current bandwagon that appears to have been ignited by The Expendables and a sense of nostalgia for some for the kind of ‘old school’ testosterone fuelled action films that filled the shelves of VHS rental stores in the eighties and nineties. It is notable perhaps that none of the films in this ‘new wave’ have yet managed to live up to the admittedly low bar set by the much-loved American muscle films of the eighties and nineties.

Hill has teamed here with Sylvester Stallone, working from a script by Alessandro Camon, to make a film that seems so stuck in the nostalgia of an older age of action films that if were not for the inclusion of a Blackberry – its novelty within the story is painfully hammered home by some incredibly leaden dialogue – it would hard to guess that the film was made as recently as this decade, or even the last.

The setting of New Orleans should have perhaps provided some interesting flavour to an otherwise bland story of a vengeful contract killer, Jimmy Bobo (Stallone), working with a cop, Taylor Kwon (Sung Kang), to track down those responsible for killing his partner and ripping him off. Sadly nothing is made of the location beyond some vague mentions of crooked redevelopment plans and with a large number of scenes taking place in drab, flatly lit locations – a somewhat interestingly designed Turkish bath aside – it would be very easy for this film to be transposed to any American city with only minor changes to the script.

As Bobo and Kwon drive between these mundane locations the audience are treated to some rather atrocious and often offensive ‘banter’. Clearly taking cues from the tradition of buddy movies of the eighties and nineties the film rests heavily on the growing relationship between these two characters and how it develops through this banter. Thomas Jane was originally slated to play the role later filled by Kang but lost out as supposedly a more “ethnic” actor was wanted. It’s clear why this was the case with so much of the back and forth between the two leads resting on racial banter. Almost all of these ‘jokes’ that hinge on race come from Bobo and are aimed in the direction of Kwon and they are never at all funny and quickly become exhausting.

Furthermore, the film never seems to have a stance on this behaviour and Stallone’s racist character ends the film happily driving off into the sunset in a brand new Ferrari, having learnt nothing at all meaningful. There are suggestions that Bobo is not just a scumbag, he often acts with a flimsy sense of honour, but it’s hard to know why we are supposed to get behind his plight or care about what happens to him.

The introduction of his daughter early on at first seems to suggest some attempt at depth to his character but ultimately she simply provides the damsel in distress necessary, it would seem, to bring the film to its climax. Another tired action trope wheeled out of retirement for one last go around.

There is some respite from the casual racism and tired plotting though, with the final scenes in particular providing some of the strongest sequences in the film. Well choreographed and competently framed and edited action bring the film almost to a close and it’s at this point that Hill finally shows that he still has some of those same strengths that made his earlier films so enjoyable.

The setting for these final action sequences are a building previously used in Will’s Hard Times and the final showdown between Stallone and Keegan, played with as much depth of character as a cinder block by Jason Momoa, features a fight using axes that is very reminiscent of the final fight using large hammers in Streets of Fire. Unfortunately these retreads of earlier work only further highlight how little here is new and how much   it seems like a poor imitation.

Seeing Hill directing an action film and being back on the big screen should be cause for celebration but Bullet to the Head comes up short in so many areas that it would unfortunately not look out of place sitting alongside the recent output of Steven Seagal on a supermarket bargain DVD shelf.

If they choose Punishment Park, before an unjust jury, they must travel on foot across an area of desolate American land in an effort to reach their goal, an American flag. They are promised that halfway along their journey they will find water and if they reach the flag they will be set free. Chasing them throughout their ordeal is a group of law enforcement officers who are assigned to Punishment Park as a training exercise.

The film begins by cross-cutting between a group of prisoners making their way across Punishment Park, the officers who are about to follow them training with lethal weapons and a trial of a group of new prisoners. The stories come to a head, the officers and the prisoners clash and the end, much like the film in general, is an incendiary indictment of a dominant system that is completely out of control.

Characterised, following its première, as something of a hysterical left-wing masochistic fantasy Punishment Park could so easily have been just that but the film is far from it and in the intervening years it has become more and more apparent that the film is far from hysterical but actually coldly reflective of the society in which we live.

Whilst the US government is not quite in the same situation as we see in Punishment Park there are certainly parallels that can be drawn between the film’s core conceptual conceit and situations in America and around the world. The temptation is of course to applaud Watkins for prescience, the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp being a possibly obvious reference point, but significantly Watkins is tapping into something far more disturbingly general about the way in which human beings can behave to one another and the abuse that often occurs when a powerful entity crosses a line. Bringing to mind the work of psychologist Philip Zimbardo, Punishment Park is disturbing and affecting not because it comes across as simply savage satire but because what occurs feels all too real.

This review was originally posted at Bleeding Cool.

It’s an introduction to a character that suggests a lot of things, not least that the character that we are about to spend almost three hours with is not entirely likeable. Then comes the real kicker, Whip Whitaker is a commercial pilot. Not only that but after drinking heavily the night before he is just about to pilot a plane of unsuspecting passengers.

Whip pauses to take a line of coke and he’s ready to fly.

What follows this first scene is a bravura piece of filmmaking from director Robert Zemekis in a sequence which inter-cuts Whip piloting and ultimately crashing a plane with scenes of Nicole (Kelly Reilly), who Whip will later encounter, scoring drugs, shooting up and eventually succumbing to a non-fatal overdose.

The plane crash, which is preceded by an incredibly effective series of tension ramping moments, is extraordinary and when seen on a big screen will leave many feeling breathless and gripping the arms of their seats. This is very much just the beginning of the story though and it is the fallout of this crash that makes up the real meat of the film.

Whip is first celebrated as a hero – his daring manoeuvre saves the lives of 96 of the 102 souls on boards – but slowly the loose threads that make up his life begin to unravel in both small and far larger dramatic ways. Most significantly his alcoholism is uncovered and as he starts seeing Nicole we begin to see two interesting viewpoints on addiction. As Whip continues to spiral downwards – aided by the angel and the devil voices on his shoulders of union rep. Charlie (Bruce Greenwood) and lawyer Hugh (Don Cheadle) – Nicole begins treatment and finds a way to recovery.

Whip still has further to fall though and Zemekis and screenwriter John Gatins provide little hope throughout that we will see a simple tale of redemption. The story develops at a leisurely pace at times, often too leisurely, but the space given to the story helps make for a fully realised  and engaging character study, and when the film reaches its climax it feels momentous in a way that is entirely justified by the journey we travel to get there.

Unfortunately there are times in Flight in which Zemekis over eggs the pudding somewhat. The attention drawing extravagance of a camera flying towards Washington’s face as he snorts a line of coke, for instance, is almost unforgivable but aside from some occasional over-the-top camera-work Zemekis plays things relatively straight and refined.

The same can’t be said for the soundtrack unfortunately, which features perhaps the most on-the-nose soundtrack choices I have ever heard in a dramatic feature. Songs featuring drug references are particularly rife, the use of With a Little Help From My Friends approaches out and out comedy, and those with an even passing knowledge of popular music will most likely tire of the incessant intrusions of oh-so-relevant song choices such as Under the Bridge or Sweet Jane.

Despite pulling you out of the film these music choices are nowhere near enough to derail what is for the most part an incredibly well handled, smart and dramatically rich film about a fascinating character. Washington has perhaps never been better and as the film reaches a climax that rests on the fascinating concept of “one lie too many” it is a testament to Gatins’ convincing writing that we almost will Whip to keep lying.

Presenting dense ethical ideas and emotionally rich situations within the arc of an engaging story, Zemekis and Gatin have made exactly the kind of big film that Hollywood can do so well, but sadly rarely do.

In the booklet for the Masters of Cinema Blu-ray release of Repo Man you comment that you can write ten to twenty pages in a good day. What sort of writing habit do you have? Do you ever get ‘writer’s block’ and if so how do you cope with it?

I haven’t experienced writers block. Not that everything I write is any good, or that those 10-20 pages won’t end up in the bin. But I’ve no problem spewing.

You both write films and write about films, which comes easier to you and is there one that you prefer more? If so, why?

Screenwriting is much more fun. It is a wonderful art form in itself and for many years I wrote scripts for the pleasure of it. But film-related writing is recompensed, which helps pay for the dog food.

What was the experience of actually filming Repo Man like, what particular challenges did you face and was there anything in particular that you learnt in the process?

It was a hot experience since it took place over six weeks in July and August, all in downtown Los Angeles which in those days was highly polluted. Tiring, too, since there were so many night shoots. So I learned to write fewer night exterior scenes! Dealing with most of the actors was a breeze since they were for the most part very professional and willing. Harry Dean Stanton was less of a pleasure – fighting with the other actors, trying to direct them, demanding salary increases – but also a very, very good actor, which made the experience worthwhile.

I understand that you originally intended to include animated sequences and flashbacks in Repo Man. Can you talk a little about these and why they did not end up in the film?

I don’t remember any flashbacks. One of the car chases was meant to turn into a cartoon along the lines of the one I drew. But in those days these things weren’t farmed out to slaves in China and Korea. Animation was much more expensive and we didn’t pursue the cartoon angle.

What do you think is the key to keeping costs down in feature filmmaking and how did you achieve it with Repo Man?

We didn’t. Most of the $1.8 million budget of REPO MAN was wasted, on Studio overheads, producer overheads, huge trucks, honey wagons, the exec producer’s trailer and other giant, slow-moving frivolities. The film should have cost $100,000, and been shot in four weeks, starring Sy Richardson and Dick Rude.

Where do you see the future of film production moving, particularly when considering current trends towards extremely expensive special effects heavy blockbusters and super cheap indies shot using easily available digital equipment?

Philippe Dauman, head of Viacom (which owns MTV and Paramount) announced that the huge returns on TRANSFORMERS 3 “affirmed our strategy of a reduced release slate and a focus on franchises.” In other words, the studios have given up on lower-budget films and want to make as few pictures as possible – toy- and superhero-based children’s films – with beef slaughterhouse and game tie-ins. Low budget and independent films will continue to be made – but how do they reach an audience? How do they make a profit when theatrical distribution and online sales are locked up by massive corporations?

As a teacher what do you think the most important lesson you teach your students is?

That they should make allies among their colleagues and continue to do creative projects with them after they leave school. This worked for me and the producers of REPO MAN (all ex-UCLA), and for Trey Parker and the SOUTH PARK guys, after they exited the University of Colorado.

I always thought the ‘generic products’ in Repo Man to be something of a deliberate satirical swipe at consumerism in the eighties but I read recently that this wasn’t the original intention. Can you talk a little about how you decided on the labelling and why?

Originally we wanted to get product placement – free beer and such – but after we drew a blank (only the Car-Freshener Corp. would give us any product!) I thought fine! Generic it shall be! Ralphs’ supermarket gave us a lot of generic goods; the DRINK and FOOD cans we made ourselves.

What can you tell me about Repo Pup? [Cox's introduction to Repo Man on the Blu-ray ends with "Coming soon..." and then an image of two dogs superimposed on a picture of space and the text "REPO PUP. Coming soon to a media device in your galaxy."]

The dogs are in their spacesuits and raring to go. But I’m waiting for a ‘cease and desist’ letter to arrive from Universal’s head of litigation. That’s what gives me energy to pursue the REPO brand.

This interview was originally posted at Bleeding Cool.

The film primarily focuses on the elderly Orin, a 69 year-old woman living in a village that has for a long time dealt with famine and hardship through a chilling mixture of infanticide and geronticide. As Orin approaches 70 it is clear that she will soon become ‘too old’ to be supported by the village and must make the journey up Narayama Mountain to die. Before doing so she decides to put her affairs in order but it just so happens that this mostly involves the sexual lives of her offspring.

The Ballad of Narayama is filled with black comedy and some really funny moments of bawdy humour as a result of all the sexual adventures (and misadventures) that the villagers get up to but there is never the sense that any of this is being treated flippantly. Cutaways to the ugly side of nature, a snake slowly swallowing a rat for instance, in the middle of a sex scene or an act of bestiality from one of the more simple-minded villagers quickly reveals the tact that Imamura is taking.

At times playing much like a bleak and cynical nature documentary in which humans are the subjects, The Ballad of Narayama is a searing and savage portrait of humanity and the fine line between civilised behaviour and base violent animal instincts. This is not just simple condemnation, there is also empathy for these often engaging and humorous characters. The blend of humour with more upsetting scenes really carries a punch and makes the film both entertaining and challenging.

Ending with a long sequence in which Orin makes her way up the Narayama mountain to die, carried on another’s back, the film takes a tonal turn and this final section is far more lyrical and sombre than what has gone before. This shift is adeptly handled and as the film reaches its beautiful and sad climax it is perhaps quite surprising, following some of the earlier broader scenes, just how moving and powerful it ultimately is.

This review was originally posted at Bleeding Cool.

Maya appears in these scenes as something of a blank slate, aside from a few awkward looks she is at first also very passive, and despite the film’s reasonably lengthy running time she always remains somewhat inscrutable, with the camera often lingering on her blank and seemingly dispassionate stare. She has one purpose it seems. To find Osama bin Laden.

Recalling the singularly focused female protagonists of seventies revenge pictures – Meiko Kaji’s ‘born for revenge’ protagonist in Lady Snowblood comes to mind – Maya has little to no back story in Zero Dark Thirty and despite multiple interactions with co-workers she seems to form no real social bonds. When she later refers to the terrorists as having killed her friends the line almost comes across as laughable due to the vague or non-existent relationships she has fostered with others.

Her main friend in the CIA and the man who we first see torturing prisoners in the early scenes is Dan (Jason Clarke), an educated CIA agent who helps Maya in her quest to hunt down bin Laden. Dan quickly becomes burnt out and returns to America, an attempt to put the torture he has inflicted upon others behind him, although not predominantly due to guilt it would seem but out of some fear of retribution. He even comments to Maya, “You don’t want to be the last one holding a dog collar when the oversight committee arrives.” That Dan is aware that what he is doing may be considered wrong emphasises how warped the situation is within the CIA. Whilst the question of whether torture is wrong or right is not represented on screen there is certainly the sense that those within the CIA know that what they are doing may not be entirely legal.

The lack of care for this subject by the characters is highlighted in a scene in which Barack Obama is seen on a television stating that America does not torture. Again director Kathryn Bigelow returns briefly to Maya’s blank stare before the characters get on with what they were doing. This isn’t a subject of particular interest to them despite their close relationship with what Obama is talking about. The characters in Zero Dark Thirty are focused on one idea and there is little to no room for self-analysis.

The controversy that has swirled around Zero Dark Thirty regarding a positive depiction of torture is a massive red herring when it comes to what the filmmakers are actually saying and appears to be largely born out of a significant amount of baggage brought to the film, rather than anything that is up there on the screen. Those who find the torture of human beings despicable, if only this wasn’t just part of the human race, will find the actions of members of the CIA in Zero Dark Thirty deplorable and disgusting. Any sense that this led to evidence that helped find bin Laden will, of course, in no way change that. It is also disingenuous to suggest that this is the whole story, as the film presents it. It is made abundantly clear in Zero Dark Thirty that there is a web of information that leads to the discovery of the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan and it has been gathered in various ways.

What has not been at the forefront of discussions relating to Zero Dark Thirty, and what was also absent from the mainstream news when bin Laden was actually killed, is the desire for his death that seems to be so often just accepted as a given. “If you really want to protect the homeland you need to get bin Laden.” So says Maya, when her dogged pursuit of bin Laden is called into question by her CIA superior Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler). When Maya says ‘get’ she quite clearly means kill. Bin Laden’s death is the ultimate goal, not his capture and arrest, and this is never once questioned by any of the characters in the film. It’s probably quite likely that it also wasn’t discussed in the real halls of government buildings in Langley, Washington and further afield either.

Bin Laden’s death is in many ways the end point of Zero Dark Thirty, but the film does not end with a whooping gung ho mission accomplished celebration of the death of bin Laden. Instead, the final line uttered in Zero Dark Thirty is “Where do you wanna go?” – said by a pilot to Maya – and a lingering shot of Chastain’s face. After another brief period of staring into her inscrutable blank stare we see her expression change to one that looks almost despairing, before finally she begins to cry.

It’s an open-ended and somewhat bleak note to end on and leaves an audience with an indelible sense of what the past two hours and forty minutes have really been about. There’s an emptiness, a pointlessness to the whole endeavour that doesn’t give the audience a sense of catharsis, a deep sigh of relief at the end that the job’s been done, we’re safe now, the bad guys lost. The final emotion is one of despair.

Director Kathyrn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal discard the simple American cinematic tradition of good guys and bad guys and leave the audience with the sense that even in the U.S. government’s attempts to guard themselves from threats and seek some cathartic relief for the truly horrible events of 9/11 they have also found themselves in the ‘bad guy’ role and it comes with a sense of pointlessness and despair which is written all over Chastain’s face. As Maya provides a symbolic surrogate for America, the final line in Zero Dark Thirty provides a crucial question for not just a post-9/11 America but a post-bin Laden America. ”Where do you wanna go?”

A crowning achievement from Welles, visual elegance combining beautifully with a hard edged but absorbingly Shakespearean tale, Touch of Evil seems like the natural succession both stylistically and thematically to Kane but it is in many ways more rewarding for being, even in spite of studio meddling, such a complete and near perfect piece of storytelling. I like Citizen Kane a great deal and consider it to be a masterpiece in many ways but I adore Touch of Evil.

Welles’ twisted Hank Quinlan is one of Welles’ greatest creations, a dark and troubling character played with conviction by Welles himself, and it is the moral downfall of the already low-down Quinlan that is the real story of Touch of Evil. Its strength though is that whilst this is more than enough to carry the film it is also filled with side plots and a multitude of engaging characters to add further depth and complexity to the story.

The married Vargas couple (Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh), for instance, appear at first to be the leads of the film, and in a way they are (they were certainly considered the stars by the studio), but in many ways they are supporting characters in the story of Hank Quinlan. It is through the treatment of Susie Vargas (Leigh) and the morally contrasted character of Mike Vargas (Heston) that Quinlan’s true self is revealed.

This contrast is also crucial to the way in which Touch of Evil works, a film that constantly refers to crossing conflicting borders, both physical and of a more symbolic nature. The confident and highly sophisticated direction from Welles and the way in which the story is pieced together in the editing (at least in the way Welles intended it to be edited) ensures this is conveyed visually and audibly with a fine attention to detail in every area. Every composition and the subtle mix of sounds that accompany them is a carefully thought out choice, a variety of techniques all in service of a thought provoking, gripping and wholly entertaining story.

Disc One

The 1998 Reconstructed Version in 1.37:1 and 1.85:1.

Whilst the inclusion of multiple versions of the film in this release is wonderful and particularly welcome from a reference point of view it is this reconstructed version that will undoubtedly get the most plays. This version of the film was put together by producer Rick Schmidlin and editor Walter Murch in 1998 using a 58-page memo Welles wrote to Universal following a screening of a rough cut of the film. A pdf of which is available from Masters of Cinema.

Welles was unhappy with the way in which the film had been edited when he left the editing room to fly to Mexico for work on Don Quixote, and also the insertion of new scenes shot by director Harry Keller.

Universal had been concerned that some of the film was confusing and the additional scenes and attempts to simplify some of the editing were efforts to make it easier for an audience to understand. Important aspects to the film, such as the cross-cutting between Mike and Susie Vargas, were lost in the version Welles saw, and he responded with the now infamous memo, a list of ways in which these and many other problems that he saw could be fixed.

Schmidlin and Murch used this memo, and a few additional memos Welles wrote regarding the sound design, to construct this new version of the film. It’s one that is closer to what Welles wanted but it’s important to note that this is not a director’s cut of the film, which is unfortunately an absolute impossibility, but it is probably as close as we will ever see.

There are a number of significant improvements in the 1998 Reconstruction that are particularly noticeable and noteworthy – the aforementioned inter-cutting and the textless opening for instance – but there are also a number of minor changes that have an impact. Changes to the sound mix, including experimentation with diegetic sounds that shares similarities with Kurosawa’s Stray Dog or Lucas’American Graffiti, and small cuts or the lengthening of scenes restore the film to something closer to Welles’ vision (going by the memo at least) and make a startling difference to the way in which key scenes work. A small trim to the sequence in which a number of people enter Susie’s room, for instance, transforms the scene from coming across as somewhat humorous to being genuinely terrifying. I could go on but suffice to say the changes here are important and add greatly.

The re-edit was achieved on a budget of just $325,000, and once completed Schmidlin and co. were given an extra $40,000 to use towards a digital restoration. This was put to good use and a number of the imperfections in the print, mostly the more significant scratches, have been removed as much as possible. This has been done delicately and there are very few times when the work done is particularly noticeable, just a few instances in which the image looks a little smoother.

There is reasonably heavy grain throughout and the contrast is a little higher than on the other versions of the film. This is mostly for the better as Russell Metty’s stunning black and white cinematography is at its best in its starkest moments.

I saw this reconstructed version theatrically around 1999 and this new HD transfer far exceeds the already rather worn out 35mm print that I saw projected. Seeing the film then was a revelation and watching this new HD version of the Reconstruction I felt the same. A beautiful transfer that befits such a visually stunning film.

This version, and the Theatrical cut, are both presented in 1.37:1 and 1.85:1. This is a definite improvement over the 50th Anniversary Edition, which only included the film in 1.85:1, and it is a welcome opportunity to compare and contrast the two ratio choices. Welles and Metty reportedly shot the film with both ratios in mind, with television and its insistence on a 4:3 aspect ratio as an obvious consideration, and the film certainly ‘works’ in both aspect ratios.

The 1.85:1 ratio is actually a crop of the 1.37:1 image and whilst this would suggest that the 1.37: 1 version is the OAR this is debatable as it seems to have been the understanding that this would have always played theatrically matted to 1.85:1. Watching the film open matted in 1.37:1 there are clear benefits – the frame includes more of the famous Wellesian ceilings for instance – and the compositions contain more intricate use of shadows than is visible in the 1.85:1 image.

I personally prefer the 1.85:1 ratio over the squarer 1.37:1 as a rule and there are certainly times here when the compositions feel more suitably claustrophobic. Both choices feel like something of a compromise for a viewer so it is the perfect choice on the part of MoC to include both. It’s also worth noting that it was never entirely clear which ratio Welles himself preferred, although comments from him appear to suggest he lent more towards the 1.37:1 ratio in general. This is evidenced in a rather lyrical piece he wrote, which is included in the booklet that accompanies this release.

The elements used for this version are as follows (as taken from the MoC booklet)

This version was reconstructed by Walter Murch & Bob O’Neil, referring to notes from Orson Welles’s 1957 memo. This 2010 HD transfer utilised a 35mm Safety Composite Fine Grain (printed 6pts. Lite) – created at YCM Lab in 1998. The restored/reconstructed mono audio (SET188751) utilised as sources the “theatrical version” source DME (SET195468), the “preview version” print (SET107951), and an ADR line. The source for the opening scene music was taken from the body of the “theatrical version”.

Special Features:

Commentary by restoration producer Rick Schmidlin (1998 Reconstructed Version – recorded in 2008) – A mixture of insightful details on the reconstruction and a few critical thoughts on the film. Schmidlin is very enthusiastic and brings some wonderful anecdotes about the film, putting together the reconstruction and the première of the reconstruction.

Commentary by Rick Schmidlin, Charlton Heston & Janet Leigh (1998 Reconstructed Version- recorded in 1999) – A little on the purely anecdotal side, this commentary track is an enjoyable listen but there’s not too much insight into the film that isn’t covered elsewhere. Heston and Leigh are particularly entertaining to listen to talking about the film and the affection they still held for it is obvious.

Bringing Evil to Life [21:00] – A collection of interview segments that piece together the production of the film. A good quick overview of the film’s production this is certainly worth watching but most of the the information is covered elsewhere and in greater depth.

Evil Lost and Found [18:00] – Essentially an extension of the above, this focuses on the problems that Touch of Evil went through and how the 1998 Reconstruction came together.

The original theatrical trailer, which includes alternate footage.

Disc Two

The 1958 Theatrical Version in both 1.37:1 and 1.85:1.

The original version of the film released in cinemas in 1958, the theatrical version of Touch of Evil is a shorter and problematic watch. Although this is the version that many who saw the film prior to 1998 (and even before the preview version was realised in 1972) will probably be most familiar with, it feels like such a significant compromise. Once you’ve seen the Reconstructed version and noticed the significant improvements, it’s almost impossible to forget the changes when watching this version.

Beyond taking an academic approach, the theatrical cut is still very much worth checking out, and at a much leaner 1 hour 35 minute running time, and with added, clunky exposition from Keller’s reshoots, the film does play more like a fun B movie thriller – as it was considered by Universal upon release.

The theatrical version is also available to watch in both 1.37:1 and 1.85:1 and although there are some areas in which the print damage clearly increases and the image gets softer (more so than the reconstructed version), the picture is still near immaculate.

The elements used for this version are as follows (as taken from the MoC booklet).

This 2010 HD transfer utilised a 35mm Safety Composite Fine Grain (#2) (w/ExtraR-7) – SET192840 – created in 1958. Reel 11 only is from a 35mm Safety CompositeFine Grain (#1) – SET192839 – also from 1958. Audio is sourced from a mono MAG– DME SET195468.

The 1958 Preview Version in 1.85:1.

Discovered in 1972, this version of the film was the halfway point between the rough cut that sent Welles to his typewriter to pen the memo, and the theatrical cut released in 1958. Sold in the 70s as the uncut version this is perhaps more compromised in many ways more than the theatrical cut, and contains even more footage from Keller’s incongruous reshoots. Considering the problematic history of the film it is an interesting watch, though, and certainly a worthy inclusion.

The Preview Version image is smoother than the other two versions but the quality of the image is still very high. As a result of “insurmountable technical problems with the 1.37:1 master of the Preview version” the preview version is only available to watch in 1.85:1.

The elements used for this version are as follows (as taken from the MoC booklet).

Also formerly referred to as the “Long” or “Extended Version”, it derives from an old surviving 1957/1958 preview print which was an interim version of the film during the editing and re-editing process prior to release. A 35mm Silent Dupe Negative (printed in 1972 from a composite preview print, which dates back to 1957/1958) – SET240723. Audio has been restored from a studio print – SET107951 – as the source. It is a 2008 HD transfer.

Special Features:

Commentary by Critic F. X. Feeney (1957 Theatrical Version – recorded in 2008) – An entertaining and lightly critical take on the film. Feeney was the resident film critic for Z Channel in the eighties and was at least partly responsible for kicking off the director’s cut craze, so it’s a little strange to hear him speaking here on the theatrical cut rather than the Reconstruction edit. Nonetheless his commentary is excellent and Feeney is as entertaining to listen to as he is to read. Whilst his commentary lacks a little in deep academic insight it is an enjoyable listen and his thoughts on the film are definitely worth a listen.

Commentary by Welles scholars James Naremore & Jonathan Rosenbaum (1958 Preview Version) – recorded in 2008) – Whilst more scholarly than Feeney’s commentary, Rosenbaum and Naremore’s commentary is a little on the dry side. Both very knowledgeable about Welles and Touch of Evil though they manage to bring with them some information not represented elsewhere on the disc.

A 56-page booklet featuring essays by Orson Welles, François Truffaut, André Bazin, and Terry Comito; interview excerpts with Welles; a timeline of the film’s history; and extensive notes on the film’s versions and ratios.

This review was originally posted at Bleeding Cool.

That is not to say that the special effects and so on are not important and worthy of high praise. Director and special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull, hot on the back of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Andromeda Strain, managed to create physical special effects that even today look entirely convincing and natural to their surroundings. The biodomes that are so important to protagonist Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern), and in many ways the human race as a whole, look less futuristic now than they may have done in 1972 (visitors to domes such as the Eden Project in Cornwall will attest to this I’m sure) but the image of these fragile structures floating in space is a powerful science fiction image, and it is one that has all the more impact due to Trumbull’s impressive use of miniatures.

But it is scriptwriters Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino & Steven Bochco’s emotional story of Freeman, the domes and his robot companions that makes Silent Running such a compelling and rewarding film. Filled with post-sixties rage about the destruction of the environment, the story of Silent Running is powerful, critical and prescient but crucially it is devastatingly heartbreaking.

Freeman Lowell is a complex and conflicted character and when he commits acts that in another context may seem unthinkable we understand his motivations and sympathise with what he is doing. Almost 40 years on it is hard to think of a more cogent film that tackles direct action and environmental concerns so thoughtfully and effectively. It’s also still hard to find a more emotionally affecting science fiction film.

This review was originally posted at Bleeding Cool.

The Iron Horse tells both a small and a large story over its more than two-hour runtime, focusing both on the story of the building of the actual railroad and the smaller romantic story of Davy Brandon (George O’Brien) and Miriam Marsh (Madge Bellamy).

The Iron Horse was a film that really helped make O’Brien a star and his pairing here with Ford was the first of many successful films directed by Ford and starring O’Brien (he also starred in Murnau’s Sunrise in 1927).

With charisma and a commanding physical presence it’s easy to see why he was an appealing choice for leading man and his background in stunt work made him the ideal choice for more action heavy roles such as this. Bellamy, despite a much lesser role, shines in The Horse Horse too with wonderfully mischievous glances that really suit scenes such as the one in which she manipulates the railroad workers into doing something they previously said they weren’t willing to do.

Ford directs these kind of scenes, those that communicate subtlety in human interactions, with real skill, making good use of edits and changes in the framing to convey visually what is being underlined by the dialogue in the intertitles. The action scenes are equally assured with clear sequences in which motivations and actions are accurately communicated to the audience. The Iron Horse could actually quite easily play without intertitles and an audience would find it incredibly easy to follow.

Ford’s fingerprints, his love for Lincoln and the mythologising of ‘The West’ for instance, are all over this early silent offering but also evident are Ford’s talents in effectively telling a compelling story on film.

This review was originally posted at Bleeding Cool.