00:12I'm often asked about the relationship between my original desire to enter the
00:21priesthood and my love for film. In other words, in a sense, going from one vocation,
00:29which is one calling, it's called, one calling, which the priesthood to another, which is a calling,
00:35which it is a commitment to a way of life, and that is the filmmaking. Of course, it's a very
00:44personal matter, but I will say that it was a matter of being honest with myself as best I could
00:52and realizing that you must do what you're called to do within yourself. The church and cinema,
01:02they both made sense to me. One particular priest who was very, very influential in my upbringing
01:09from the age of 11 to the age of 17 or 18, that made sense. He really made sense. He
01:15made sense
01:16about morality and life in the outside world, away from the neighborhood and the church we were in.
01:23And this was a person that I wanted to be like. Of course, you know, in order to be a
01:31true cleric,
01:32in that sense, you do have to feel that yourself. You have to be, there's a commitment that you can't
01:38join it because you want to be like somebody else. It has to come from you. And I found all
01:44of this
01:45started to filter into storytelling, storytelling. This particular priest did help try to balance
01:54common sense in the world and also moral sense. But the world we're in, you know, there was the
01:59Bowery, when they called them the bums at the time, living on the Bowery, were part of the world that
02:02I grew up in, was a criminal element, along with the working class people who were just trying to
02:07stay alive, and the older Sicilians and Neapolitans who had come to America who didn't speak English.
02:13So, so much was entangled when it went on in that neighborhood and in my own life. And it was
02:18so
02:18powerful to me. The desire to tell these stories on film came from that. And a lot of what I
02:25experienced in church, for example, the visual impact of the church, the statues, whether they
02:31were plaster statues or whether they were actually beautifully formed versions of some sort of
02:39sculpture, devotional paintings, Stations of the Cross, the light in the Basilica of St. Patrick's
02:47Old Cathedral, the light during the daytime and how it shifted through the stained glass windows,
02:53the tone and the mood of the Basilica itself, the nature of the rituals that was pre-Vatican II,
02:59all informed me, of course, and my approach to cinema as I began making movies. The concept of morality,
03:09right and wrong, good and bad, good and evil, and how faith is a major element in leading a life
03:23that could be a moral life, you know, and how faith can also be something which contains a great deal
03:31of
03:31doubt and how there's a struggle for faith. And this is something that comes from that time that was
03:39planted at that time. How does one live? It was the old story. There's a Mean Streets or a number
03:44of the other
03:44films. If you're in a world that is on, you're in the front lines of a world that is pretty
03:53tough and
03:54pretty negative and at times evil is all around you, how do you try to live balanced, not balanced,
03:59but how do you try to live a moral life? And so these questions always have come back to me
04:06and this
04:06is what I think of all the time. When I was young, obviously it was a very different world than
04:18it
04:18is today. The movies were only seen in theaters, before television, and due to many different
04:25reasons, late 1940s and early 50s, including health, I found myself seeing a lot of movies. My parents
04:32would take me to see my brother. I loved the movies I saw, but there was no doubt that this
04:40world of
04:40movie making, where these miraculous images and stories came from, really felt very distant. It was
04:52something that I could not imagine I would ever be involved in. The point is that creativity with
05:01cinema, like any real art form, is you really should know the old work that has gone before,
05:06the old masters. And I do think you should know it, meaning you should be exposed to it.
05:13You should see and experience them as best you can. Do not look at them to learn from them. Look
05:20at
05:21them to see if it speaks to you, if you're interested at all, if you're curious. You know, it's not
05:26a matter of
05:27I'm going to learn something from watching all of Max Hofold's. I'm going to learn something.
05:31You know, it's a matter of your response to it. You're aware that that is out there. You're aware
05:38that that's part of the medium you're using. And so, in a way, even if you reject it, you have
05:46to
05:46know what you're rejecting, I think. And it's to learn from the old masters. Hence, you need conservation,
05:51you need preservation. And you need presentation of these films. It's unfortunate that many of
05:56the new films will be seen on a small screen. However, we did see some great films on television,
06:02which was a small screen at the time in the late, in the fifties. So, somehow the power of films
06:08like,
06:08like Citizen Kane burst through that 16 inch black and white screen, you know. And when we saw it in
06:15a
06:15theater and a print that was being shown and re-release in the late fifties, it was another
06:23experience. You know, I wish I had seen it on the screen for the first time, but it didn't. The
06:29effect
06:29seeing it on television was still very, very strong enough to change my mind about how films are made.
06:34And so, you know, it's really important to be aware of these things that have happened before and
06:40to maybe reinterpret them or reinterpret, reinterpret to the point where you discard them. Even you have
06:47a hundred years of cinema, more than a hundred years now to, uh, sort of, I should say, dive into
06:56in a way and find your way, you know, because in 1960, we had basically the 19th, some of the
07:041930s,
07:05all through the forties and fifties of American films. All the silent films were not seen.
07:10If you did see a silent film by that point, it was in 16 millimeter, scratched up, jerky motion.
07:17And you wondered why anybody went to see these things. You had some foreign films, French and
07:22Italian mainly, many British films, um, but nothing from Japan until early fifties.
07:29Uh, and so there was a possibility German films to a certain extent from the 1920s. Again,
07:34they were silent. Russian films, they were silent. So whatever prints we got, dupe negatives,
07:39they weren't the best, but you were aware of these things. And yet I think by 19, 1960 or 61,
07:48one could still say you could actually absorb the history of cinema from all over the world,
07:52because there wasn't that much to see, you know, compared to now. Now you have everything,
07:57and everything is on the same plane, on the same time scale, almost. You can watch something from 1920,
08:03and then see something that was made yesterday. The people who made, uh, cinema and created cinema,
08:08I should say in 19, 1898 to 1903, to 1910, to 1916, to 1925. It's a very different, they were
08:19creating a
08:19language. They were creating a new form, a new art form. And so we, uh, myself and my generation, many,
08:26you know, even, uh, others at that time, but primarily the generation that came out of the fifties and
08:31sixties that started making films in the seventies in, um, um, the cinema is, uh, that was made
08:38particularly in, in, in America, um, uh, that we were, um, exposed to constantly is, uh, a block of
08:47time that, uh, is something very special to us. No one really ever thought about, um, the continuity,
08:53uh, the, uh, preservation or the restoration, or even just the preservation, the conservation,
08:58of these, the, these works that, that influenced us so much, not only influenced, but made up so
09:04much, uh, made up so much of our lives. There was a transition from the old studio system in the
09:10sixties to the early seventies, a transition from the old studio system to the new Hollywood at that time.
09:16But in the, in the midst of it, you don't know if there's going to be a new Hollywood.
09:20You see, we just knew that the studios were closing down. They were selling off their props.
09:24Uh, who knows what was happening to their prints. A lot of the prints are on nitrate stock.
09:28A lot of the negatives are nitrate. They're just disintegrating. All of this was the end of an
09:32era, you see. And so we started, um, uh, trying to raise the consciousness of, uh, uh, people who
09:39were in power at the time to, um, preserve the films, conserve the films. Uh, ultimately,
09:45particularly with the ancillary markets of video and that sort of thing, uh, they began to realize that
09:49there's, uh, uh, there's still, uh, an ability to, these are assets very important to them.
09:55We knew they were more than assets. They were a lifeblood to us.
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