Fifty film luminaries are asked the question, “What do you love about the movies?” in the handsome and must have (if you love movies) tome, WHAT I LOVE ABOUT MOVIES (Faber and Faber).
From fifty famed film professionals we get a vast and varied response, although some of their thoughts are shared and the response is shadowed by the experience of the film and the venue or platform in which it is experienced.
A film is a film is a film, but how you see it can make a large difference. Before our new digital age where you can watch product on any device, it was either the cinema or television. And don’t forget the drive-in, where some films actually do play better, more favourably.
First of the rank of respondents is Francis Ford Coppola, the godhead of 70s cinema, who reckons movies are the most diverse and complete art form, that uses everything – music, emotion, images, writing and structure. “A divine collection of all human inspiration and art forms.”
And Francis speculates what kind of movies people from the past, like Goethe, would make.
Francis’ ex son in law, Spike Jonze, director of Her and Being John Malkovich among others, talks about “making something that I can just fall into. You’re just consumed with it.”
He cites the work of Michel Gondry as fitting that category.
Gondry likes the fact that you can watch a movie and then talk about a movie,– a collective dream state and perhaps a shared chair in the collective psychoanalyst’s office.
Alexander Payne, the film maker who has given us Nebraska, Sideways, About Shmidt, and other deadpan delights, declares that we are so lucky to have lived in an era where cinema exists.
“It’s a way of conquering death. You can capture somebody alive and refer to them for the rest of time….and then there’s the unconscious aspect to it; we love movies because of their relationship to dreams.”
William Friedkin, director of the classics The French Connection and The Exorcist, talks about the one ton pencil, which is, “a vast crew of people to whom you must communicate and express your ideas and the images in your mind and the way they move and combine.”
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT MOVIES is dedicated to Philip Seymour Hoffman, who contributed to the book shortly before his untimely and tragic death, and makes a case for the difference between theatre and cinema, two forms in which he was so gifted in.
From Almodovar to Wasikowska, Aronofsky to Walter Murch, WHAT I LOVE ABOUT MOVIES is an engrossing, entertaining and enlightening book about this great art form of the past century.
Not only is it packed with insights from its esteemed subjects but has intriguing comments on the subjects by the contributors of Little White Lies magazine.
No book on movies would be complete without a pictorial aspect and WHAT I LOVE ABOUT MOVIES comes with a portrait of each subject, each and every one worth the purchase price of this exquisite and indispensable book for anyone who has ever pondered the question, what I love about movies?
Worth buying multiple copies – one for your library and others for the perfect film buff gift.
For more about WHAT I LOVE ABOUT MOVIES, visit http://www.littlewhitelies.co.uk/the-magazine