Sage Advice from Nicholas Ray / Weekly Film Reviews #3
"I understand there are young people making three-minute, five-minute films to fulfill course requirements in school. In this way the young filmmaker becomes a person withdrawn from his society. He does everything alone. Finally, I don't think you can make a film alone. You need the lab, you need the guy who sells the film, you need the guy who makes the camera. You need your wife and your friends to provide transportation, to do things for you. You just can't make a film alone. To me the raison d'être, the obligation, of the director is to provide the audience with a heightened experience, a heightened sense of being.
If a director can't say hello to other people, how is he going to say hello to an audience?"
--Nicholas Ray, "Don't Fuck with a Natural", from "I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies" (University of California Press: 1993)
The above book I re-read this week for the third time. I've never harbored any desire to ever act, but I'd strongly suspect this book would be essential if I did, particularly the 'In Class' chapters that are faithful transcriptions of Ray's work as film teacher at Harpur College in Binghamton, New York.
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And, reviews for the week:
Labels: Hunter S. Thompson, Nicholas Ray, Uptown Magazine
posted by aaron at 12:27 PM
2 Comments:
I like RED a lot, but not quite as much as you. The Kim Dickens character and her relationship to Cox felt superfluous to me, which, along with Tom Sizemore's unimposing performance, is the only criticism I have. My guess is she was included in order to give Cox someone to speak his big monologue too, which is as good a reason as any, I suppose.
Noel Fisher played another psycho on LIFE this week.
Point well taken about Cox needing someone to "play off of". It was somewhat uninspired, but I'm glad they went that route and didn't bother to devise some rote narration - that would have ruined the entire affair for me.
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