00:13I always found that going to see a film and studying it at the moment as you're
00:18watching it for the first time doesn't work. You have to let the film work on
00:22you or not. Then if you're hit by certain things if you know you go there and you
00:26go back and you try to find very often if you imagine a sequence or a scene or two
00:32that's edited a certain way you find that the camera wasn't that close but it
00:35appeared that close in your memory. That's interesting. Why? Well it may have been
00:40used sound effect, may have been use of a cut, you see, or a camera move that was
00:45imperceptible at first. So there was almost like a memorization of, I guess it
00:51was almost like a photographic memory of images, editing, sequences in a film,
01:00scenes, shots. And so I would draw upon that. Don't forget there was really no
01:05way of seeing these things unless it was shown on television again arbitrarily or
01:10it was playing in a theater somewhere and you had to go to find that theater, you
01:13know. And so you had to do it from memory. Whether it was the Marshall's badge on the
01:22dirt ground against the boot of Gary Cooper at the end of High Noon or you
01:29know part of the chariot race in Ben-Hur. You had to go and see the film again. You
01:34can make little drawings try to, I used to try to draw my own versions of these
01:37things from memory, you know. And so I remember seeing The Small Back Room, a
01:44Powell Pressburger film, on television in an afternoon one day, I think in the mid,
01:51mid, early to mid 50s. And I remembered the mood of this, this film. It's a very
01:57strange film. I recall very, very clearly the opening title sequence. Particularly
02:03there's a shot of traffic light changing from red to green. Of course it's a black
02:09and white film, but you do get the impression. It's the angle of the traffic
02:14light and it's the rain that's in the frame around it. There's something about
02:18that shot that made it very powerful and memorable. They only saw it once. And also
02:24through the windshield as that person is driving, as Michael Goff I think is
02:29driving in the beginning. And through the windshield, it's the, at London during the
02:35war, everything is dark and the windshield is, the windshield wipers are wiping
02:39away this heavy rain and you're looking through. And those two images became
02:43really key images for Taxi Driver. There's another shot in there too in Taxi Driver that
02:50he goes to buy guns. This is a specific reference for example, but he goes to buy
02:57guns from Andy in the hotel room and he picks up one of the guns. He goes to the
03:04window and the gun is pointed at two or three women outside, I think with an umbrella, but
03:12that's placed on a dolly or a track and it tracks over. And there was always something I loved in
03:20this,
03:20King Vidor's film, um, Northwest Passage. There's an attack by the Native Americans
03:26against the fort. And at one point, he has somebody with a rifle, cameras shooting
03:32over that person with the rifle and you see the Native running in the background.
03:36And the man is put on a track, a dolly. The actor and he's, the camera just tracks
03:42with him, fires a gun, running along, tracking along in the same direction as the,
03:47uh, the Native was running. So we tried the similar thing. That was directly, uh, and I started putting then,
03:52um, uh, Travis on a dolly at times, although we did it in, uh, in, uh, Green Streets too,
03:58but not particularly with the, uh, not as specific as with the gun from Northwest Passage.
04:09When we started making films, we were, uh, very conscious of cinema around us, particularly the
04:16older Hollywood cinema too. So, um, this was a time when you could actually make reference
04:21to films that people considered just, quote, entertainment, unquote. Um, and there were people
04:28around the world, uh, France and England, Italy, other places, uh, Japan who knew what you were
04:33talking about. And so we started making references and this was our generation doing that. Um, you
04:40know, uh, again, the, the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard making a reference directly to Humphrey
04:45Bogart in, uh, Abu Dussufla, uh, Breathless, where, uh, Belmondo looks at, uh, an image of Bogart,
04:52I think from, uh, How Do They Fall, his last film. And he does the, the gesture that Bogart
04:58always was known for with his thumb and says bogey, I think. Um, uh, there was, uh, uh,
05:06references to Hawke's films, references to Hitchcock constantly in those films. My first
05:12kind of a feature is Who's That Knocking On My Door, which is kind of a, I look at it
05:16as
05:16kind of a juvenilia as kind of like a, we were trying things, took about three or four years
05:20to make over time, trying to find how to tell a story without telling a straight narrative.
05:26We used, um, references, uh, to Westerns in the film as a, uh, starting point for conversations.
05:34Uh, they were like testing each other. And so we had a reference particularly to The Searchers,
05:39which everyone knows now to a certain extent. Uh, but at that time The Searchers was not considered
05:45a very good film. Um, it was like a franchise picture. For example, it was always usually a John
05:50Ford film. Hitchcock had a film a year, so Vertigo was, uh, was, uh, ignored. Um, it was just another
05:57Hitchcock film. It was a little, uh, murky. They felt the audience and, uh, I should say the critics more.
06:03But at the age of 13 and 14, The Searchers was something that was really important to us,
06:07uh, when we saw it, um, that reflected the world we were in, the America that we knew or that
06:17we were
06:17experiencing at that time. Um, and the portents of the character of Ethan Edwards. And so, and the beauty
06:24of the film, the poetry, the imagery, and the language, we use that as a basis to start conversations
06:30in the movie and that sort of thing. And particularly you're dealing with a film that had,
06:36that took place in the Lower East Side. And people who certainly wouldn't even have seen a horse except
06:41for one of the two, uh, policemen on horses on, uh, on Prince Street, maybe.
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