"A fascinating collection of life lessons from some of the greatest directors working today." Roger Corman
In these vivid and revealing interviews film directors as diverse as the Coen brothers, Oliver Stone, Ang Lee, Mira Nair, PJ Hogan, Kevin Smith, Anthony Minghella and Neil Jordan talk in extraordinary detail and with amazing candor about making their first films. Each chapter focusses on a celebrated debut film - from Blood Simple to Salvador; from Muriel’s Wedding to Diner; from Clerks to Angel - and tells its story from the inside: from writing the script to raising the money; from casting the actors to assembling a crew; from shooting to editing; from selling the movie to screening it. Along the way every aspect of the movie industry is explored - from dealing with agents and moguls for the first time to pitching your movie as a debutant director; from languishing in development hell to confronting test audiences from hell. Each chapter is not only a memoir of a particular film, but an emotional journey in which the director relives the pain and elation, the comedy and the tragedy of making their first movie. For anyone who wants to direct movies these tales of triumph and disaster, of sleepless nights and nailbiting days will be enthralling and terrifying in equal measure. For everyone else these interviews will provide a fascinating and entertaining glimpse of directors who have by now become household names.
Stephen Lowenstein has worked on British television documentaries for Channel 4, ITV, and the BBC. He is the writer/director of two critically acclaimed short films and currently has several feature-length projects in development in England and America. He lives in London. --טקסט זה מתייחס למהדורה שאינה מודפסת עוד או למהדורה לא זמינה של כותר זה.
Review
"My First Movie is a fascinating collection of life lessons from some of the greatest directors working today. Each director tells a different story, yet one thing unites them all, as I can attest to from my own first movie--the joy and terror felt by all first timers. This should be required reading for all film students and film fans alike." ? -Roger Corman --טקסט זה מתייחס למהדורה שאינה מודפסת עוד או למהדורה לא זמינה של כותר זה.
From the Back Cover
"My First Movie is a fascinating collection of life lessons from some of the greatest directors working today. Each director tells a different story, yet one thing unites them all, as I can attest to from my own first movie--the joy and terror felt by all first timers. This should be required reading for all film students and film fans alike." ? -Roger Corman --טקסט זה מתייחס למהדורה שאינה מודפסת עוד או למהדורה לא זמינה של כותר זה.
From the Inside Flap
ts their first time--and film directors are no exception.
In these vivid and revealing interviews, a collection of filmmakers as diverse as the Coen brothers and Ken Loach, Ang Lee and Kevin Smith, Anthony Minghella and Gary Oldman, Neil Jordan and Mira Nair talk in extraordinary detail and with amazing candor about making their first films. Each chapter focuses on a director's celebrated debut--be it Angel or Blood Simple , Clerks or Diner , Muriel's Wedding or Truly, Madly, Deeply --and tells the inside story: from writing the script to raising the money, from casting the actors to assembling the crew, from shooting to editing, from selling the movie to screening it. Along the way, every aspect of the movie industry is explored: from dealing with agents and moguls for the first time to pitching your movie as a debutante director, from languishing in development hell to confronting test audiences from hell. --טקסט זה מתייחס למהדורה שאינה מודפסת עוד או למהדורה לא זמינה של כותר זה.
Were you always passionate about movies? Did you see lots of movies when you were kids?
JC: We always went to a lot of movies. But when we were kids it was watching movies on TV. I guess our earliest film education came from a guy called Mel Jazz who had a movie programme on during the days. He was an eclectic programmer. So we were exposed to a lot of strange things-through the eclectic programming genius of Mel Jazz. Ethan once kidded that he had just about the whole of the Joe Levine catalogue because he'd have 81/2 one day, you know, Fellini, The Nights of Cabiria or something. And the next day he'd have Sons of Hercules. So it was a mixture of European art films and badly dubbed Italian muscle movies, essentially. I mean it was very strong in that area. He also liked a lot of the golden age of late fifties, early sixties studio comedy product. Doris Day, Rock Hudson movies. I'll Take Sweden, you know. Bob Hope stuff.
EC: Later, bad Bob Hope.
JC: A little later on there was a film society at the University of Minnesota that showed the kind of stuff that you wouldn't normally be exposed to: Godard, and the Marx brothers-who were both kind of hip at the time.
EC: I guess that doesn't exist any more. But for a period people would show black and white 16 mm prints on some crappy projector in a basement in the university building somewhere. I guess video ended that.
When you saw movies did you think, 'I want to do that'? I mean, you started making films when you were kids, didn't you?
EC: Yeah. Super-8 things. But it didn't rise to the level of serious ambition. It was another way of goofing off. I don't know when it got sort of serious for me. Certainly later than Joel, since he went to film school and I didn't. For me it was more an opportunity that presented itself through Joel's work than any long-harboured ambition I'd had.
JC: But these things are sometimes just pursuing what might be a casual interest in the path of least resistance. Even the decision to go to film school. Something that strikes you at that moment as being a bit more interesting than something else. It's not as if you really know what you're going to do with it. Or if you're going to do anything with it.
EC: Yeah. There are other people you read about like Scorsese for whom it seemed like a religion from an early age. It certainly wasn't that with either of us.
Could you have imagined going off in a completely different direction?
EC: I never seriously thought about any career so I couldn't honestly say. But, yeah, I suppose it could have happened.
Can you say a little about your experience of NYU film school?
JC: I think film schools are quite different now from when I went. First of all, a lot of people on the undergraduate programme weren't really that interested in movies. A lot of kids who had to go to college thought, this might be fun. I'll go to film school. You know, taking the path of least resistance. And it started that way for me. But it ended up being a fairly interesting place to be. If you took advantage of the school's resources, which were extremely limited but were at least something, you could go out and make little movies and sort of screw around with it without essentially having to pay for it beyond the tuition. I also met people there who we ended up working with later.
What kind of films did you make there?
JC: It was just an extension of what we were doing with Super-8 cameras when we were little kids. Just kind of screwing around. It was all pretty crude. But even that stuff is kind of an interesting thing to have done. When you think about people who are making a first movie, it's a little bit different having had to look through the camera and frame a shot or imagine how it's going to get cut together, than it is if you're coming to it from a completely different discipline like a writer, who's never even made a Super-8 movie and is having to figure it out intellectually. So I think it does have some value even if what you're doing is a very crude exercise.
What happened once you got out of NYU?
JC: I started working as an assistant editor on low-budget splatter movies. Ethan and I were both living in New York at that point and we started writing together. We would get these writing jobs from producers who had these low-budget movies and sometimes wanted stuff written or rewritten. We got some writing jobs together that way at that point and that led to us writing something to do ourselves-which was Blood Simple.
How did the idea of writing Blood Simple come about?
JC: We wrote a little thing for Frank LaLoggia, one of the directors I was working for as an assistant editor; we wrote a screenplay with Sam Raimi. So we just sat down and thought what kind of movie could we make that was sort of producible on a really small budget like these horror movies, but that isn't necessarily a horror film.
EC: The inspiration was these movies that Joel had been working on which had been done mostly by young people like us who didn't have any credentials or credibility in the mainstream movie industry. But they'd gone out and raised money underground for their little exploitation movies, got the movies made and subsequently wandered into the place where Joel was working to have them cut. It was that evidence that it could be done that led us to try it ourselves: notably Sam's movie, The Evil Dead , because Sam was the most forthcoming in sharing all his experience with us.
You said you chose the particular kind of story because it was manageable at a certain budget. Was it also because you loved noir movies?
JC: On the one hand, we were both interested in and had read a lot of pulp fiction like Cain and Hammett-and Cain especially when you think about movies that involve murder triangles. On the other hand, as Ethan said, the sort of financial model for the film was also, to a certain extent, a creative influence on it. So it was kind of a mix of those two things.
EC: Also, there were a couple of notorious Texas domestic murder stories that had just happened in the early eighties. I'm sure that figured.
Did you write from beginning to end, or did you write particular scenes down as they came to you?
JC: We start at the beginning and work through to the end. On Blood Simple that was definitely the case. It was just a scene by scene accretion, wasn't it?
EC: Right. We don't outline and we don't really know where we're going. We might have some vague feeling that we're going to arrive at some point in the future but it's the vaguest sort of feeling till we actually write ourselves to that point.
But Blood Simple 's plot is so intricate, so exquisitely crafted. Is it really just an organic process by which you arrive at such a complex structure?
JC: Yeah. Sometimes writing yourself into a corner means that there is no way out and you just have to bag the whole thing. But sometimes writing yourself into a corner means that you have to think of a way out of the corner. If you read the whole thing, you might think 'Oh this is very intricately plotted out.' But just because, by putting yourself into a box you figured a way out of the box, doesn't mean it was all premeditated. Blood Simple started something else that we've done pretty much on every subsequent movie, which was that we've always written parts for specific actors. And as we've made more and more movies and got to know more and more actors, they're frequently people we know personally from one place or another or that we've worked with in the past. In Blood Simple , we wrote the part that Emmet Walsh played for Emmet just because we knew his work. The other parts were written without knowing who would play them.
What's the starting point for a story like Blood Simple? Is it a situation, a kind of equation: a man wants his wife killed and gets killed himself? Or a character: a slippery private eye like the character played by M Emmet Walsh? Or is the dichotomy between plot and character a false one?
JC: It is, inasmuch as who does what to whom has to be consistent to some sort of idea of who the characters are, even if they're rather crude. But in this one the balance probably tips more towards the story than the characters. I guess this one was conceived more as a thriller. I remember that it was an early idea in Blood Simple that someone would fake the murder, and then do another murder that made more sense. That was there as an equation, as you say, at some point fairly early in the writing-earlier than the point that we got to that scene. Our initial thinking about it was probably more about plot than about the people in it. But maybe it's just something you just assume after the facts, since the characters in it now seem pretty crude.
What were you doing while you were writing Blood Simple to make a living? And how long did it take to write?
EC: I was working as a temporary clerical typist. It took a long time because it was an evening and weekend type proposition. Months.
What did you do once you had a screenplay? You were still not 'the Coen Brothers' as you are today.
JC: Cro-Magnon Coen brothers dragging our knuckles across the floor! (Laughs.) We followed the example of Sam Raimi. Sam had done this trailer, almost like a full-length version of The Evil Dead , but on Super-8. He raised sixty or ninety thousand dollars that way, essentially by taking it around to people's homes to find investors. He financed the movie using a common thing that people making exploitation movies had used, which was a --טקסט זה מתייחס למהדורה שאינה מודפסת עוד או למהדורה לא זמינה של כותר זה.
Description:
"A fascinating collection of life lessons from some of the greatest directors working today." Roger Corman
In these vivid and revealing interviews film directors as diverse as the Coen brothers, Oliver Stone, Ang Lee, Mira Nair, PJ Hogan, Kevin Smith, Anthony Minghella and Neil Jordan talk in extraordinary detail and with amazing candor about making their first films. Each chapter focusses on a celebrated debut film - from Blood Simple to Salvador; from Muriel’s Wedding to Diner; from Clerks to Angel - and tells its story from the inside: from writing the script to raising the money; from casting the actors to assembling a crew; from shooting to editing; from selling the movie to screening it. Along the way every aspect of the movie industry is explored - from dealing with agents and moguls for the first time to pitching your movie as a debutant director; from languishing in development hell to confronting test audiences from hell. Each chapter is not only a memoir of a particular film, but an emotional journey in which the director relives the pain and elation, the comedy and the tragedy of making their first movie. For anyone who wants to direct movies these tales of triumph and disaster, of sleepless nights and nailbiting days will be enthralling and terrifying in equal measure. For everyone else these interviews will provide a fascinating and entertaining glimpse of directors who have by now become household names.
From Booklist
They say you never forget the first time, and 20 prominent directors reminisce vividly about their inaugural efforts behind the camera in this collection of original interviews. Editor Lowenstein, a filmmaker himself, elicits candid and revealing responses from subjects representing mainstream Hollywood (Oliver Stone, Anthony Minghella), American independent (the Coen Brothers, Kevin Smith), British (Mike Leigh, Neil Jordan), and foreign-language filmmaking (Ang Lee, Pedro Almodovar). Most are very forthcoming about insecurities and blunders as they impart information that is alternately entertaining and technical, though many admit to surprising technical ignorance when they launched their careers. Despite their varied personalities and filmmaking approaches, the directors radiate enthusiasm, and Lowenstein speculates that they enjoyed the rare opportunity to talk about a movie they weren't trying to sell. They have learned to appreciate the freedom they enjoyed on their first films, when they had no reputations or expectations to live up to. Wanna-be directors may get the most out of this, yet anyone interested in the filmmaking experience may find it valuable. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --טקסט זה מתייחס למהדורה שאינה מודפסת עוד או למהדורה לא זמינה של כותר זה.
About the Author
Stephen Lowenstein has worked on British television documentaries for Channel 4, ITV, and the BBC. He is the writer/director of two critically acclaimed short films and currently has several feature-length projects in development in England and America. He lives in London. --טקסט זה מתייחס למהדורה שאינה מודפסת עוד או למהדורה לא זמינה של כותר זה.
Review
"My First Movie is a fascinating collection of life lessons from some of the greatest directors working today. Each director tells a different story, yet one thing unites them all, as I can attest to from my own first movie--the joy and terror felt by all first timers. This should be required reading for all film students and film fans alike." ?
-Roger Corman --טקסט זה מתייחס למהדורה שאינה מודפסת עוד או למהדורה לא זמינה של כותר זה.
From the Back Cover
"My First Movie is a fascinating collection of life lessons from some of the greatest directors working today. Each director tells a different story, yet one thing unites them all, as I can attest to from my own first movie--the joy and terror felt by all first timers. This should be required reading for all film students and film fans alike." ?
-Roger Corman
--טקסט זה מתייחס למהדורה שאינה מודפסת עוד או למהדורה לא זמינה של כותר זה.
From the Inside Flap
ts their first time--and film directors are no exception.
In these vivid and revealing interviews, a collection of filmmakers as diverse as the Coen brothers and Ken Loach, Ang Lee and Kevin Smith, Anthony Minghella and Gary Oldman, Neil Jordan and Mira Nair talk in extraordinary detail and with amazing candor about making their first films. Each chapter focuses on a director's celebrated debut--be it Angel or Blood Simple , Clerks or Diner , Muriel's Wedding or Truly, Madly, Deeply --and tells the inside story: from writing the script to raising the money, from casting the actors to assembling the crew, from shooting to editing, from selling the movie to screening it. Along the way, every aspect of the movie industry is explored: from dealing with agents and moguls for the first time to pitching your movie as a debutante director, from languishing in development hell to confronting test audiences from hell.
--טקסט זה מתייחס למהדורה שאינה מודפסת עוד או למהדורה לא זמינה של כותר זה.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
Joel and Ethan Coen:
Blood Simple
Were you always passionate about movies? Did you see lots of movies when
you were kids?
JC: We always went to a lot of movies. But when we were kids it was
watching movies on TV. I guess our earliest film education came from a guy
called Mel Jazz who had a movie programme on during the days. He was an
eclectic programmer. So we were exposed to a lot of strange things-through
the eclectic programming genius of Mel Jazz. Ethan once kidded that he had
just about the whole of the Joe Levine catalogue because he'd have 81/2 one
day, you know, Fellini, The Nights of Cabiria or something. And the next
day he'd have Sons of Hercules. So it was a mixture of European art films
and badly dubbed Italian muscle movies, essentially. I mean it was very
strong in that area. He also liked a lot of the golden age of late fifties,
early sixties studio comedy product. Doris Day, Rock Hudson movies. I'll
Take Sweden, you know. Bob Hope stuff.
EC: Later, bad Bob Hope.
JC: A little later on there was a film society at the University of
Minnesota that showed the kind of stuff that you wouldn't normally be
exposed to: Godard, and the Marx brothers-who were both kind of hip at the
time.
EC: I guess that doesn't exist any more. But for a period people would show
black and white 16 mm prints on some crappy projector in a basement in the
university building somewhere. I guess video ended that.
When you saw movies did you think, 'I want to do that'? I mean, you started
making films when you were kids, didn't you?
EC: Yeah. Super-8 things. But it didn't rise to the level of serious
ambition. It was another way of goofing off. I don't know when it got sort
of serious for me. Certainly later than Joel, since he went to film school
and I didn't. For me it was more an opportunity that presented itself
through Joel's work than any long-harboured ambition I'd had.
JC: But these things are sometimes just pursuing what might be a casual
interest in the path of least resistance. Even the decision to go to film
school. Something that strikes you at that moment as being a bit more
interesting than something else. It's not as if you really know what you're
going to do with it. Or if you're going to do anything with it.
EC: Yeah. There are other people you read about like Scorsese for whom it
seemed like a religion from an early age. It certainly wasn't that with
either of us.
Could you have imagined going off in a completely different direction?
EC: I never seriously thought about any career so I couldn't honestly say.
But, yeah, I suppose it could have happened.
Can you say a little about your experience of NYU film school?
JC: I think film schools are quite different now from when I went. First of
all, a lot of people on the undergraduate programme weren't really that
interested in movies. A lot of kids who had to go to college thought, this
might be fun. I'll go to film school. You know, taking the path of least
resistance. And it started that way for me. But it ended up being a fairly
interesting place to be. If you took advantage of the school's resources,
which were extremely limited but were at least something, you could go out
and make little movies and sort of screw around with it without essentially
having to pay for it beyond the tuition. I also met people there who we
ended up working with later.
What kind of films did you make there?
JC: It was just an extension of what we were doing with Super-8 cameras
when we were little kids. Just kind of screwing around. It was all pretty
crude. But even that stuff is kind of an interesting thing to have done.
When you think about people who are making a first movie, it's a little bit
different having had to look through the camera and frame a shot or imagine
how it's going to get cut together, than it is if you're coming to it from
a completely different discipline like a writer, who's never even made a
Super-8 movie and is having to figure it out intellectually. So I think it
does have some value even if what you're doing is a very crude exercise.
What happened once you got out of NYU?
JC: I started working as an assistant editor on low-budget splatter movies.
Ethan and I were both living in New York at that point and we started
writing together. We would get these writing jobs from producers who had
these low-budget movies and sometimes wanted stuff written or rewritten. We
got some writing jobs together that way at that point and that led to us
writing something to do ourselves-which was Blood Simple.
How did the idea of writing Blood Simple come about?
JC: We wrote a little thing for Frank LaLoggia, one of the directors I was
working for as an assistant editor; we wrote a screenplay with Sam Raimi.
So we just sat down and thought what kind of movie could we make that was
sort of producible on a really small budget like these horror movies, but
that isn't necessarily a horror film.
EC: The inspiration was these movies that Joel had been working on which
had been done mostly by young people like us who didn't have any
credentials or credibility in the mainstream movie industry. But they'd
gone out and raised money underground for their little exploitation movies,
got the movies made and subsequently wandered into the place where Joel was
working to have them cut. It was that evidence that it could be done that
led us to try it ourselves: notably Sam's movie, The Evil Dead , because Sam
was the most forthcoming in sharing all his experience with us.
You said you chose the particular kind of story because it was manageable
at a certain budget. Was it also because you loved noir movies?
JC: On the one hand, we were both interested in and had read a lot of pulp
fiction like Cain and Hammett-and Cain especially when you think about
movies that involve murder triangles. On the other hand, as Ethan said, the
sort of financial model for the film was also, to a certain extent, a
creative influence on it. So it was kind of a mix of those two things.
EC: Also, there were a couple of notorious Texas domestic murder stories
that had just happened in the early eighties. I'm sure that figured.
Did you write from beginning to end, or did you write particular scenes
down as they came to you?
JC: We start at the beginning and work through to the end. On Blood Simple
that was definitely the case. It was just a scene by scene accretion,
wasn't it?
EC: Right. We don't outline and we don't really know where we're going. We
might have some vague feeling that we're going to arrive at some point in
the future but it's the vaguest sort of feeling till we actually write
ourselves to that point.
But Blood Simple 's plot is so intricate, so exquisitely crafted. Is it
really just an organic process by which you arrive at such a complex
structure?
JC: Yeah. Sometimes writing yourself into a corner means that there is no
way out and you just have to bag the whole thing. But sometimes writing
yourself into a corner means that you have to think of a way out of the
corner. If you read the whole thing, you might think 'Oh this is very
intricately plotted out.' But just because, by putting yourself into a box
you figured a way out of the box, doesn't mean it was all premeditated.
Blood Simple started something else that we've done pretty much on every
subsequent movie, which was that we've always written parts for specific
actors. And as we've made more and more movies and got to know more and
more actors, they're frequently people we know personally from one place or
another or that we've worked with in the past. In Blood Simple , we wrote
the part that Emmet Walsh played for Emmet just because we knew his work.
The other parts were written without knowing who would play them.
What's the starting point for a story like Blood Simple? Is it a situation,
a kind of equation: a man wants his wife killed and gets killed himself? Or
a character: a slippery private eye like the character played by M Emmet
Walsh? Or is the dichotomy between plot and character a false one?
JC: It is, inasmuch as who does what to whom has to be consistent to some
sort of idea of who the characters are, even if they're rather crude. But
in this one the balance probably tips more towards the story than the
characters. I guess this one was conceived more as a thriller. I remember
that it was an early idea in Blood Simple that someone would fake the
murder, and then do another murder that made more sense. That was there as
an equation, as you say, at some point fairly early in the writing-earlier
than the point that we got to that scene. Our initial thinking about it was
probably more about plot than about the people in it. But maybe it's just
something you just assume after the facts, since the characters in it now
seem pretty crude.
What were you doing while you were writing Blood Simple to make a living?
And how long did it take to write?
EC: I was working as a temporary clerical typist. It took a long time
because it was an evening and weekend type proposition. Months.
What did you do once you had a screenplay? You were still not 'the Coen
Brothers' as you are today.
JC: Cro-Magnon Coen brothers dragging our knuckles across the floor!
(Laughs.) We followed the example of Sam Raimi. Sam had done this trailer,
almost like a full-length version of The Evil Dead , but on Super-8. He
raised sixty or ninety thousand dollars that way, essentially by taking it
around to people's homes to find investors. He financed the movie using a
common thing that people making exploitation movies had used, which was a --טקסט זה מתייחס למהדורה שאינה מודפסת עוד או למהדורה לא זמינה של כותר זה.