Of all the film styles in all the world, Steven Soderbergh chose in 2006 to adapt Joseph Kanon’s novel The Good German as a faux- noir, emulating the techniques and styles of Hollywood’s golden age, with no modern concessions.

It wasn’t exactly pitched that way to Warner Brothers though. He told Empire, “I said, OK, there are two possibilities. It’s either live action and black and white, or it can be colour but animated.” Our idea was that it sort of be in the style of Fritz The Cat, I love that style. They vetoed it.” 

The plot follows George Clooney’s war correspondent Jake Geismar to a shattered post war Berlin in July 1945. Ostensibly he is covering the Potsdam conference, the three way carve-up of the vanquished Germany by America, Russia, and Great Britain. Unofficially, he is hoping to find his pre-war German lover Lena Brandt (Cate Blanchett). She is in a quid pro quo “relationship” with Jake’s army driver Tully (Tobey Maguire). Tully is up to his neck in shady dealings with Russian general Sikorsky (Pavel Issaykanov). When Tully’s body is washed up on the shore of Potsdam, Jake is drawn into a mystery surrounding Lena’s supposedly dead SS scientist husband, Emil. In this black and white picture, every act, deed and remark is shaded in grey.

Right from the off, Soderbergh sets out his stall. We open on a brutally frank sex scene between Tully and Lena, more of a transaction really, from the dead eyed look in her eyes, as she is bent over the dresser. Blanchett researched by reading a contemporaneous book by a typical German housefrau, living hand to mouth, trusting no one. The author had irrevocably changed after being repeatedly raped by Russian Occupiers, and began trading sex for food and goods. The film plays like a noirish film of the period, but with no Hays code, so there is the frank language and sex, brutal violence and no clear cut good guys. Jake is the closest thing to a hero, but he is pretty clueless, spending much of the film being robbed, lied to and beaten up. He is a little like Joseph Cotten’s character in The Third Man, the film it most closely emulates, although it tries to copy the ending of Casablanca as well, with a more cynical edge. The film’s poster is even a homage.

The plot tries to address the moral quandary of individual war crimes being overlooked if information held is vital to the victors, but the three way narrative between Jake, Lena and Tully muddies the waters. Technically, the film is an interesting, if cold, exercise in restraint. Soderbergh shot in colour stock, then pulled all the colour out, to match the restored period footage of bombed out Berlin, especially unused footage from Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair. Costumes, make-up and set dressing were exaggerated colour wise, so the contrast was crisper and greater in the finished film. Pink hued walls appeared grey, although Blanchett’s lip stick is almost black!

Soderbergh shot in the studio and Hollywood backlot. Heaps of rubble were made from steel armatures with carved, painted foam on top. They were wheeled around to where they were needed, doubling up in different arrangements for various scenes. He used traditional boom microphones and lights, and old 1940′s Panavision camera lenses. The period lenses give a wider field of vision, beyond tight close ups and two-shots. They minimised the need for cross-cutting, creating a different kind of interaction between characters in scene, enabling longer takes and wider movement around the set. The camera angles and movement were all copied from 1940′s style.

During the studio era it was common for the director to arrive on set, block out shots and light them with stand-ins. Soderbergh said “The reason they (directors) no longer work that way is because it means making choices, and sticking to them. That’s not what people do now. They want all the options they can get in the editing room.” He shot the film so it would “go together very specifically”, and had “a pretty polished cut at two days after we wrapped.”

The film opened to mixed reviews, and even though it had a modest budget, box office returns were disappointing, critics citing it was all style over substance. Soderbergh has been threatening retirement for some time now, citing a possible move into photography. His latest, and possibly last project, after a very busy burst of film-making is Behind The Candelabra, starring Michael Douglas as Liberace, which opens June 7. Whatever you decide to do after that Steven, “Here’s looking at you, kid!”

“A king has his reign, then he dies. It’s inevitable.”

It is undeniable that Prometheus has problems in the script department, that characters behave in odd ways and are sometimes the writers pawns, moved from point A to B to get to the next set piece. Even when one takes into account first draft scripter Jon Spaihts deleted scenes, such as the team finding an alien worm and high- fiving, to forewarn Milburn’s reckless excitement at finding the “Hammerpede” that goes all “deep throat” on him.

No, for me, the appeal of Prometheus has to lie in the grand, overall themes and underlying symbolism and ideas, some subtle, some not so. I’m not about to volley back every “How does Shaw run about when she’s just had that squidy baby cut from her insides?” (oh alright – space meds?!)  It’s like taking a step back in a portrait gallery. After all, Ridley Scott is a trained artist, a renowned world builder, and cinema is a canvas of sorts. I’m not going to pretend I’m astute enough to have grasped every implied pattern and so on stitched throughout – Prometheus Unbound  is as good a place as any to start.

The “strands of Alien DNA” Ridley Scott talked about refer really to the creation and destruction of life, and the link between them, the Alpha and Omega Promethean ideal Weyland strives to emulate, to become a twisted God himself. The Engineers, who sacrificed themselves to create new life, are appalled by man’s hubris – that instead of embracing their ideal, man seeks “eternal life”, to be “one with God”.  Ridley didn’t want a straight forward creature feature, he’d been there, done that. Even his original thought that the Space Jockey ship be a weapons delivery platform became more ambiguous. Now it’s implied the Prometheus crew have shifted the balance by their trespass – what they saw as in invitation in the cave painting is probably a warning to stay away. Shaw even says as they enter the Head / ampule chamber that they’ve changed something. The film is more about belief, questioning, searching for answers and misplaced pride. Built around that admittedly not very deep premise is astounding production design and effects, superb cinematography and a brilliant musical score. 

Ridley sees the film based around Shaw and the android David. I see David as by far the more interesting of the two. It was a great idea to have him acknowledged as an android from the off, rather than “undercover” like Ian Holm in Alien. Exposed to the crew’s bigotry and casual dismissal, it is a sly delight to note how certain line readings and body language have us guessing as to when David moves from his pre-programming to his own self-serving purpose. I particularly like his line to Shaw that “All children want to kill their parents” – when he awakens the Engineer and speaks to him, is he setting Weyland up to be killed?

John Kenneth Muir elaborates greatly here on the parent / child dynamic at all levels in the film, saying, “ judging by the interactions between parents and children in the film, and taking into account the Prometheus myth, the film makes a case that David is right.  Parents fear children because the ascent of their offspring in some way portends the death of the creator.  And there’s nothing more frightening –even to Gods, apparently – than facing annihilation and oblivion.  And children fear and hate parents because parents control them and hold onto precious life to the bitter end.” 

Then there are the aliens themselves, the monsters. Some complained at a lack of traditional chestbursters and so on, I love the fact that they went with different grotesque designs, Lovecraftian in some aspects. Also, more importantly, they are for the most part practical effects. It is great to see on The Furious Gods Blu ray documentary such tricks as; a simple wire tugging the Hammerpede, a fake arm snapping, a rod puppet “Deacon” burst from the Engineer and shuffle to its feet: “some rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born”.

Ultimately, Prometheus strives to be more than a sequel or prequel to Alien, throwing up more questions than answers, striving to burst free from the abdomen of a summer blockbuster. I think we should applaud the fact it got made at all. Maybe I’m being optimistic, but I hope in years to come critical reaction to it will thaw, as happened with Blade Runner.

J J Abrams registers births, marriages and deaths

The most emotionally satisfying and thrilling sequence in J J Abrams’ reboot of Gene Rodenberry’s “wagon train to the stars” must be the pre-title opener. Yet it barely (!) features any of the characters we know and love. What it does do is boldly set out the motivation for both villain Nero and future hero James T Kirk in a mini-epic where “the needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the one”….

Abrams means to shake things up in the Trek universe from the off, introducing in a disorientating fashion the USS Kelvin streaking past in extreme, upside down close up, before spinning it around right way up to our eyes – there is no up or down in space. The Kelvin is an older vessel than the gleaming Enterprise, though here probably in its prime –   we are at a momentous star date in Federation history, where a time-warping schism is on the cusp of being formed. The “almost Soviet-era, submarine like design” ship (named after Abram’s magic loving torch bearer grandfather) has been directed to investigate a black-hole like anomaly, from which has emerged future renegade Romulan Nero (Eric Bana) and his crew. Their vastly bigger, monstrously enhanced vessel The Narada  is about to kick the crap out of our heroes.

Nero is out for revenge on the Federation, and Spock in particular, for a cosmic foul up that caused the destruction of his home world in his own timeline. He’s not in the mood to negotiate, raining destruction down on the outgunned Kelvin, before ordering Captain Robau over to surrender. As Robau leaves to travel over, he places “Mr kirk” in charge of the Kelvin. During the broadside, Abrams whips the rug out from under our feet again, by having a crew member sucked out through a hull breach into space, the sound instantly dropping out as her body tumbles past furious phaser banks silently vaping around her.

When the Kelvin detects Robau’s life signs wink out as Nero’s patience snaps and he kills him, Kirk orders retaliatory fire, his words cut short by the impact of weaponry on the hull. The deadly encounter is fast and furious, an epic whose stakes ratchet ever higher. Kirk orders the evacuation of the ship by shuttles, including his pregnant wife Winona (Jennifer Morrison), the two maintaining a running conversation by communicator. We finally learn from her that he is George Kirk. And these events will transpire to have his son (“Tiberious? No way! We’ll name him after your dad. We’ll call him Jim.”) born in the fire of a space battle, rather than the peace of Iowa, as was intended.

Abrams originally intended to open with Spock’s birth, which would have muddied the space-time flow even more – he’s older than Kirk, too many time shifts. And he was also at one point set on Mark Wahlberg for Kirk’s dad. Thankfully, we got a pre-fame Chris Hemsworth as George, to fool the less clued in audience a little as to who we are rooting for, up to the reveal.

All the opening characters are important because they inform our emergent hero Jim Kirk’s temperament, and the choices he will make will be shaped by his relationship to these critical, defining events. An early idea was for the infant Jim to be beamed out of the womb as his mother’s medical shuttle is destroyed. Rather than make him an orphan, Abrams and his musical scorer Michael Giacchino tug our heartstrings with sacrifice.

George discovers the bridge instruments are smashed – he’ll have to manually pilot the breaking up starship into the belly of the Romulan beast to give his crew a chance to get away. He knows he’s doomed, and clutches at every last precious audio moment with his wife through her delivery. The sound again drops out as the broken back vessel is blasted on its collision course – we are intimately invested with the couple in this most dramatic of births. The score track“Labour Of Love” swells, George’s “I love you” cruelly cut short as the Kelvin impacts Narada. It’s as gut wrenching and tear jerking a moment as Han Solo’s “I know” to Leia before being frozen in carbonite in The Empire Strikes Back. As his tearful wife cradles Jim, the little “wagon train” of shuttles escapes the wreckage. The fluting score builds to the triumphal “Enterprising Young Men”, and the bold main title majestic reveal.

Michael Giacchino said at the time “Of course we were manipulating you, that’s why you go to movies – to be manipulated!”

Today marks the birthday of one of the giants of 20th Century cinema, Orson Welles. True, he had a hit and miss career, but his influence is far reaching, if only for his masterpiece, Citizen Kane. In 1991, BBC’s Arena strand made this in depth documentary on the film, which you can watch below (source: Cinephelia & Beyond). We also have a great video of the film set to The Union Forever by The White Stripes, a Cinemashup by Jeff Yorkes. 

Judge Minty, the long in development labour of love fan film which has recently been touring comic festivals, has finally been released on line, and we have it for you below. The film, about an over the hill Judge who takes the long walk into The Cursed Earth, stars artist Greg Staples in a cameo as Dredd, and was written by 2000 AD regular, Michael Carroll. It’s amazing what can be done on a tiny budget.

Update: And here is a reel of extended audio extras that didn’t make the final cut.

Has ever a film had more of a 360 degree critical turnaround than Michael Powell’s 1960 psychodrama, Peeping Tom? Possibly Heaven’s Gate, although at least Powell wasn’t blamed for the perceived ruin of a whole studio. Dilys Powell of The Sunday Times described Peeping Tom as “essentially vicious”. It seemed the director was wilfully flaunting a daring approach, horror as complicit voyeurism, pushing boundaries that this previously feted critics darling wasn’t to be allowed to cross.

Powell and his previous production partner (under the unofficial aegis of  The Archers) Emeric Pressburger had made fifteen successful films together, including The life And Death Of Colonel Blimp, The Red Shoes, Black Narcissus, and A Matter Of Life And Death, before going splitting up in 1956.  In 1960, Powell perversely changed tac with a pitched screenplay from Leo Marks about a young man who kills with a concealed blade in his camera tripod, recording his victims death agonies while forcing them to watch themselves in an attached mirror. The protagonist / antagonist suffers from scoptophilia – the urge to gaze. Powell would turn this on its head by making the audience question its relation to the horrific acts on screen, an idea ahead of its time – see the remake of Maniac, mostly seen through the killer’s POV, his face only glimpsed in mirrors.

When Powell suggested Peeping Tom as the title, Marks said “Won’t that get all the wrong people in?” Powell replied, “Well, lets get all the wrong people in as well as the right ones…”

Mark lewis (Carl Boehm) is a murderous peeping tom killing Soho prostitutes while filming the act, all the while frustrated by not getting the perfect shot. By day he is a focus puller, by night he shoots tacky porno films. In between he makes his own snuff movies. The daring opening sequence shows Mark picking up a prostitute, filming the transaction with his concealed camera, following her back to her dingy room, past a sneering old woman (encouraging us to feel shame). In her room she looks directly into the camera at us, announcing the going rate for her favours. As she starts to undress, the camera angles down and is obscured, before a bright light comes on. The camera (and our POV) advances menacingly close on the woman’s face, and she screams. Powell then cuts to a whirring film projector – Mark is now in his room, watching back the film of the murder. like us, he is the audience. The vivid, almost lurid colour of the film further highlights the tawdry setting and draws the eye to the deeds of the killer.

Lewis is a monster, but he is also a victim, whose psychiatrist father looked upon him as his own lab rat, in his experiments on the causes and effects of fear. We see home footage of a young Mark being awakened in the night, his father placing lizards in his bed. He is never allowed a moments privacy, constantly tormented. And what is his father’s later birthday present to him? A movie camera. What makes these scenes more disturbing is not only does Powell play the father, his own nine year old son Columba plays the young Mark, further drawing film-maker and audience into a shared, guilty fascination. Powell didn’t endear himself with critics and audiences any further by casting Moira Shearer, heroine of The Red Shoes, as a bit part actress murdered by Mark and bundled into a trunk. If there was a deeply black vein of humour in the film (Mark later entertains while the body is still hidden) it passed audiences by. Alfred Hitchcock saw Peeping Tom before his own Psycho was released in the same year. He adroitly filmed a droll trailer with him guiding the audience on a tour around Bates Motel – “The blood – don’t go in there, it’s just terrible.”

Mark is pursued by his lodger Helen (Anna Massey); this fledgling relationship between a forward woman and shy, snuff killer is echoed later in Michael Mann’s Manhunter; as  Helen interrupts Marks viewing to get closer, so Reba (who is blind) snuggles up to Francis Dollarhyde / The Toothfairy as he watches home movies of his intended victims.

As stated earlier, critical drubbing upon release was harsh. Derek Hill of The Tribune famously said “The only really satisfactory way to dispose of Peeping Tom would be to shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer.” The film was pulled from many cinemas and quietly buried by the distributor. Although it has been widely claimed the film ruined Powell’s career, he went on to make several more films, though none very successful. He gave Helen Mirren her screen debut in 1969′s Age Of Consent. Powell has always denied he was ashamed of Peeping Tom, although he  only give four sparse mentions of it in his autobiography – perhaps it was too painful to talk about it.

Powell’s (and The Archers) critical reappraisal came about largely thanks to super fan Martin Scorsese, who led for efforts to have it re-released and digitally restored. He said “I have always felt that Peeping Tom and [Fellin's] 8 1/2 say everything that can be said about filmmaking, about the proces of dealing with film, the objectivity and subjectivity of it, and the confusion between the two. Peeping Tom shows the aggression of it, how the camera violates.”

Dilys Powell recanted her original view and embraced the film. She said “If in some afterlife conversation is permitted, I shall think it my duty to seek out Michael Powell and apologise.”

Even after nineteen years, many people think that the dinosaurs of the Jurassic Park films are solely CGI creations, ushering in a new dawn and signalling the death knell of old school movie effects magic.  They are wrong, of course. If anything, it is the outstanding animatronic creature performances of practical effects and make-up genius Stan Winston and his dedicated team that so successfully sell the reality of a prehistoric theme park gone pear-shaped.

The late Stan Winston was an award winning make-up, creature and visual effects artist who once said “I don’t think of myself as a special effects guy; I create characters.” He confidently told Jurassic Park director Steven Spielberg that he could create full scale, animatronic dinosaurs that would interact convincingly with the human actors on set and location. Winston began with highly detailed, well researched sketches from his talented team, and then built fifth scale, then full scale sculptures, or maquettes, as they are now known. The smaller sculptures were sliced into segments, so that when they were copied and enlarged with the internal armature, the team had a good idea of how detailed the final skin would have to be to maintain the precision movements beneath, giving the illusion of a living, breathing dinosaur.

A variety of methods were used to create the dinosaurs motion; cable-actuation, radio-control, and hydraulics. For certain close-ups, the top half of the T-Rex was attached to a flight simulator, nowadays a gimble would be made. Detailed legs and a head were created for close-ups. Movements of a mini-replica of the full scale T-Rex operated by a puppeteer were replicated in real time in the full scale animatronic beast. The Raptors were variously rod puppets, cable and radio-controlled, even men in suits.

The Velociraptor model was actually based on Deinonychus, because it was larger and more fierce in appearance. However, during filming, a similar version of the film Raptor was discovered and named the Utahraptor, leading Stan Winston to quip “We made it, then they discovered it.” Later films in the series reflected the latest palaentologist thinking, such as the idea that velociraptors had feathers.

Rather than Winston’s team try and match the CGI wide shots of the dinosaurs, it was the other way around, ILM following the old school example. Stan Winston credits Phil Tippett’s go-motion work as an inspiration, even though Tippett, when Spielberg said CGI had put him out of business, replied, “Don’t you mean extinct?” This remark made it into the final film when palaentologist Alan Grant first comes across the cloned dinosaurs.

Winston believed if you can do it live, you should. He believes the animatronic dinosaurs, brilliantly modelled, operated and lit, raised the bar for CGI to match their realism. But ultimately, he tips his hat to Steven Spielberg, the master story-teller, who weaved all the elements together – human, animatronic, CGI – to create “the most fun dinosaur movie we have ever seen.” After Jurassic Park, Stan Winston “evolved” into CGI (not forgetting make-up and animatronics, his first loves), setting up Digital Domain with previous collaborator director James Cameron, and Scott Ross, late of ILM.

I leave the final word to the late, lamented, practical and make-up effects legend himself, from an interview with now defunct Hotdog cinema magazine:

“I remember when Laura Dern walked on set and saw the sick Triceratops, how she really truly felt what she felt and it allowed her to have that feeling. When that Tyrannosaurus Rex, which weighed 25,000 lbs, 12 tonnes of dangerous machine, was smashing into a car, I guarantee those kids – they didn’t have to act afraid. The audience can feel that, the audience can tell the difference when something is completely animated, so that’s the magic of mixing animation and live action. I think that should never go away.”

Author James Jones exploded onto the literary scene in 1951 with From Here to Eternity, a fictionalized account of his experience in Hawaii before and during the attack on Pearl Harbor. A film version came two years later and was instantly deemed a classic as it swept that year’s Academy Awards, winning eight out of thirteen nominations. Jones’ second novel, Some Came Running, was a meandering affair about a veteran returning to his small town after failing to make it as an author. The book was savaged by critics and didn’t match the success of his debut, but it was still adapted into a successful film of the time, which also scored five nominations, though just for acting, costumes, and a song. His third novel, Pistol, wasn’t even considered by Hollywood until it was condensed into an episode of a TV anthology a decade later, and by the time Jones finally scored big again in 1962 with his fourth book, The Thin Red Line, the best adaptation he could get was a somewhat stock studio production that came and went before slipping into obscurity. To this day, the film has been completely overshadowed by Terence Malick’s later adaptation of the novel, and the one and only DVD release Stateside was a region-free pan&scan cheapie spat out in 1998, which has itself slipped out of print and into obscurity. Before resuming my exploration of the films of Malick, I decided to dig this one out and give it a watch. Because… well, because it came first. And I’d rather give it a chance to stand on its own before getting to Malick’s adaptation just so I’m evaluating it in the proper context.

The basic structure of the novel is in place, as C “for Charlie” Company are among the troops dropped on the Japanese held Pacific island of Guadalcanal. As bonds and enmities form between the men, they have to plow through the constant hail of enemy fire with the ultimate goal of conquering a massive hill – named the Dancing Elephant because of its shape from the air – and a fortified camp through which the enemy troops are manned and supplied. The film flips the order in which these two appear in the novel, the Dancing Elephant shifting from the centerpiece to the big climax, which doesn’t harm things as both are still ultimately impressive setpieces.

The screenplay was by Bernard Gordon, a studio writer for Columbia who still maintained steady and dependable work after being Blacklisted, thanks to producers like Charles Schneer and Philip Yordan (who produced this film) continuing to supply him with gigs, first under fronted names, then refusing to back away from letting him use his own after the bold defiance of Spartacus changed the atmosphere of the system. His work on this script is equally steady and dependable, taking a massive, episodic book with a sprawling ensemble, and stripping it down to its iconic elements as it re-arranges them into something new. It’s very cleanly done, and he does create powerful setpieces and character moments… but in my opinion, he goes maybe a little too far, to the point where this is less an adaptation than it is an entirely new story re-built from scraps of the novel. It’s not bad, it’s just a bit disappointing as a reader looking for an adaptation of a solid read.

The ensemble has mostly been narrowed to two main leads. Private Doll (Kier Dullea, four years before 2001: A Space Odyssey) is a fusion of two characters from the book. His namesake was a wily bastard who often performed above and beyond the call of duty as a mask for his own cowardice and jealousy against other men. The other was Private Bell, a meditative internal philosopher, pondering the fate of his wife back home while both fetishizing and admonishing the battlefield around him. This is the character we mostly get on the screen, as the Doll of the film is a free-thinker who refuses to cave to the callous orders of his superiors or abandon his guilt as he sees both friends and foe alike fall on the battlefield. The scene where he scores the first kill of the group when he beats a stray Japanese soldier to death with his bare hands after a fierce fight is just as powerful here as it was on the page, and as he becomes more comfortable with killing as the film goes on, it’s as a result of him pouring his emotions into his actions, making him increasingly unstable, instead of burying them like a “good soldier”. Bits from the Doll character of the novel feel out of place, as the thieving of a pistol and grenades no longer have the smirky charm that sold them, but hanging that character’s emotional drive on the lamenting philosophies of Bell actually works quite well, and there’s a great new climactic moment where this Doll is in such a daze from mowing down enemy soldiers that he keeps firing at (though missing) his own men, only letting up when he runs out of ammo.

The other main character is Sergent Welsh (Jack Warden). In the novel, he was a sadistic anarchist who reveled in his own instability and the effect it had on others, even as this allowed him to perform spectacular feats on the battlefield and make harsh judgment calls that would cause others to freeze up. Here, he still has the nastiness and constant sense of delight, but instead of being an antagonist (despite Doll seeing him as such) he’s a mentor figure who genuinely believes that the only way to keep his men from breaking on the battle field is to first break them himself. He pushes them over a metaphorical edge so when they come across a real one on the battlefield, they won’t hesitate to leap off it. And this is shown as nothing but effective as, aside from Doll’s frequent breakdowns, everyone performs ably and admirably, and Welsh expires in Doll’s arms with the final lesson that he truly did know what it took to be a good soldier, and now it’s Doll’s turn to accept his fate with open arms.

This attitude is the biggest alteration from a novel which was a cynical and sarcastic examination of how the hell of the battlefield drove people mad in a way that was almost addictive, with violence creating a daisy chain of violence by flipping a switch in people which couldn’t easily be flipped back. Here, all the horrors are on display – the wounded soldier who the Japanese refuses to finish off in the middle of a battlefield just so he’ll keep screaming, the platoon leader Captain Stone (changed from Stein, as an anti-semitism thread from the novel has been censored) being dismissed from his command just because he second guessed wiping out all his own men in a suicide mission, people dropping from bullets and mortars left and right and you never know if your friend is going to make it to the other side with you – but these are now presented as challenges for soldiers to overcome in order to do their part to save the day in the end, instead of just more killing with promotions being a cheap reward people use to further justify more killing.

For a specific example, there’s a scene where soldiers on patrol come across a mass grave of dead Japanese. In the book, it devolved into soldiers one-upping each other in terms of the body parts they could rip out and the loot they could find in pockets or in tooth fillings. Here, it becomes a cautionary lesson as Welsh backs everyone away and shows the grave to be a mined trap. In another interesting scene, original to the film, the soldiers have conquered the Japanese camp and spend the night digging through souvenirs and drinking sake, unaware that Japanese nests have been lying in wait in trenches beneath the huts. They open fire on the Americans, mowing down over two thirds of the platoon before they’re taken out. It’s a great scene of horror, of how letting down your guard can lead to the deaths of dozens… but it’s again denied the cynicism of the novel as the surviving soldiers rally, vowing to stand together and take down the Dancing Elephant, a sequence drawn out over half the book which has now been reduced to the heroic final 15 minutes.

Once again, Doll is the only one who seems phased by things. Homosexuality on the battlefield is openly explored in the novel, mostly focused on the character of Fife (though the Doll of the novel had his own encounter at a later point). Here, Fife is the best friend of Doll, and the two have a close bond throughout their tender interactions. During the party at the camp, Fife strips down and redresses himself in womens’ underwear, a geisha robe, and the garish makeup of a drag queen, and puts on a show for the men. The boys eat it up, cheering as Fife peels off his stockings, but Doll maintains his distance. He’s uncomfortable with this side of Fife, but can’t take his eyes off the man, and Fife peeling a stocking off his leg mirrors a memory Doll had earlier of the eight days of marriage he spent with his wife before he shipped out. Their feelings for one another are left unresolved as the Trojan Horse ambush leaves Fife, still clad in drag, among the piles of dead.

It’s an odd subtext to layer in the film and it’s never actually spoken of, with more time spent on a watch Doll loaned to Fife to represent passing along his “time to go” to someone else (which clashes with an earlier death metaphor motif of “your number’s up”). Something feels a little lost or rewritten in the script at points like this, as it seems to want to explore something taboo only to be stamped over with something typical and “safe”. Which is the biggest failing of the film in general, that it’s been handed a bold work of literature which charged head-on into controversial material, but the studio acceptabilities of the time meant they had to “tidy” it up, leaving it just another war movie. America’s involvement in Vietnam had already begun by this point, but it was only just ramping up and was still a year away from the full troop deployments that led to the numbing combat which changed how our entire country looked at and portrayed war. If this film had waited just a few more years to be made, it really could have sunk its teeth into the source material and become something culturally significant. As it is, it’s left feeling dated and no bolder than any typical studio war movie of the decade which preceded it.

Which isn’t to say it’s bad. The script, while compromised, is still quite strong, with a steady escalation to both the story and the characters. The rivalry between Doll and Welsh has a lot more complexity to it than a typical strawman “pro war vs anti war” argument. And the direction is very clean. I haven’t said much about Andrew Marton because his work here is largely workman, but he was a very experienced director at the time and does an admirable job of letting the material unfold. Andrew – born Endre – started directing in his native Hungary before joining the wave of talent emigrating out of Europe during the spread of the Nazis in the 1930s. He quickly became a contract director for MGM before settling into a gig helming television and film productions for producer Ivan Tors (Sea Hunt, Flipper), but made the biggest name for himself as a strong second unit director on the likes of Cleopatra and Ben Hur (where he’s often praised for working on the classic chariot race). As a side note, he was among the numerous directors involved with The Longest Day, on which author James Jones worked as one of several writers. Even as Marton stopped directing his own features at the end of the 60s, he kept on with second unit work for Kelly’s Heroes, The Day of the Jackal, and The Message. With The Thin Red Line, he shows a good skill balancing character drama with combat action, much of which was filmed on location in the jungles of Spain. The score and the way everyone strikes a dramatic pose as they die are a little old fashioned, but Marton’s dependable direction creates powerful moments like Doll refusing to hide in a trench during a night bombing, or the entire platoon trudging through a swamp, or the Trojan Horse ambush, or a silent charge through the tight tunnels of a mountain.

Dependable is a word that best describes the film as a whole. The cast is dependable. The script is dependable. The direction is dependable. Nothing is phenomenal, nothing blows me away, nothing stakes a claim for this being an overlooked classic… but it’s not bad. It’s dependable. It’s compromised, yes, but it’s still an entertaining film that tells a good story and captures just enough of the original book that I don’t feel entirely robbed. I’ll probably forget the film in a year, but that just means I can watch it again down the road, and depend on it to entertain me again. I can’t say it’s worth your time to hunt down, but if you do, it won’t be a waste of the effort.

Up next, I get to see what Malick did with the novel. All… holy crap, it’s nine minutes shy of three hours long? I guess the 20 year gap between films robbed Terry of the ability to bring one in at 90 minutes. Geez.

Last Saturday at the San Francisco International Film Festival, Steven Soderbergh delivered the keynote speech, pulling no punches about studio executives, indie vs blockbuster marketing, and his idea of the difference between cinema and movies. We have the video and full transcript of the speech below.

A few months ago I was on this Jet Blue flight from New York to Burbank. And I like Jet Blue, not just because of the prices. They have this terminal at JFK that I think is really nice. I think it might be the nicest terminal in the country although if you want to see some good airports you’ve got to go to a major city in another part of the world like Europe or Asia. They’re amazing airports. They’re incredible and quiet. You’re not being assaulted by all this music. I don’t know when it was decided we all need a soundtrack everywhere we go. I was just in the bathroom upstairs and there was a soundtrack accompanying me at the urinal, I don’t understand. So I’m getting comfortable in my seat. I spent the extra $60 to get the extra leg room so I’m trying to get comfortable and we make altitude. And there’s a guy on the other side of the aisle in front of me and he pulls out his iPad to start watching stuff. I’m curious to see what he’s going to watch – he’s a white guy in his mid-30s. And I begin to realize what he’s done is he’s loaded in half a dozen action sort of extravaganzas and he’s watching each of the action sequences – he’s skipping over all the dialogue and the narrative. This guy’s flight is going to be five and a half hours of just mayhem porn.

I get this wave of – not panic, it’s not like my heart started fluttering – but I had this sense of, am I going insane? Or is the world going insane – or both? Now I start with the circular thinking again. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s generational and I’m getting old, I’m in the back nine professionally. And maybe my 22-year-old daughter doesn’t feel this way at all. I should ask her. But then I think, no: Something is going on – something that can be measured is happening, and there has to be. When people are more outraged by the ambiguous ending of The Sopranos than some young girl being stoned to death, then there’s something wrong. We have people walking around who think the government stages these terrorist attacks. And anybody with a brain bigger than a walnut knows that our government is not nearly competent enough to stage a terrorist attack and then keep it a secret because, as we know, in this day and age you cannot keep a secret.

So I think that life is sort of like a drumbeat. It has a rhythm and sometimes it’s fast and sometimes it’s slower, and maybe what’s happening is this drumbeat is just accelerating and it’s gotten to the point where I can’t hear between the beats anymore and it’s just a hum. Again, I thought maybe that’s my generation, every generation feels that way, maybe I should ask my daughter. But then I remember somebody did this experiment where if you’re in a car and you’re going more than 20 miles an hour it becomes impossible to distinguish individual features on a human being’s face. I thought that’s another good analogy for this sensation. It’s a very weird experiment for someone to come up with.

So that was my Jet Blue flight. But the circular thinking didn’t really stop and I got my hands on a book by a guy named Douglas Rushkoff and I realized I’m suffering from something called Present Shock which is the name of his book. This quote made me feel a little less insane: “When there’s no linear tie, how is a person supposed to figure out what’s going on? There’s no story, no narrative to explain why things are the way things are. Previously distinct causes and effects collapse into one another. There’s no time between doing something and seeing the result. Instead the results begin accumulating and influencing us before we’ve even completed an action. And there’s so much information coming in at once from so many different sources that there’s simply no way to trace the plot over time”. That’s the hum I’m talking about. And I mention this because I think it’s having an effect on all of us. I think it’s having an effect on our culture, and I think it’s having an effect on movies. How they’re made, how they’re sold, how they perform.

But before we talk about movies we should talk about art in general, if that’s possible. Given all the incredible suffering in the world I wonder, what is art for, really? If the collected works of Shakespeare can’t prevent genocide then really, what is it for? Shouldn’t we be spending the time and resources alleviating suffering and helping other people instead of going to the movies and plays and art installations? When we did Ocean’s Thirteen the casino set used $60,000 of electricity every week. How do you justify that? Do you justify that by saying, the people who could’ve had that electricity are going to watch the movie for two hours and be entertained – except they probably can’t, because they don’t have any electricity, because we used it. Then I think, what about all the resources spent on all the pieces of entertainment? What about the carbon footprint of getting me here? Then I think, why are you even thinking that way and worrying about how many miles per gallon my car gets, when we have NASCAR, and monster truck pulls on TV? So what I finally decided was, art is simply inevitable. It was on the wall of a cave in France 30,000 years ago, and it’s because we are a species that’s driven by narrative. Art is storytelling, and we need to tell stories to pass along ideas and information, and to try and make sense out of all this chaos. And sometimes when you get a really good artist and a compelling story, you can almost achieve that thing that’s impossible which is entering the consciousness of another human being – literally seeing the world the way they see it. Then, if you have a really good piece of art and a really good artist, you are altered in some way, and so the experience is transformative and in the minute you’re experiencing that piece of art, you’re not alone. You’re connected to the arts. So I feel like that can’t be too bad.

Art is also about problem solving, and it’s obvious from the news, we have a little bit of a problem with problem solving. In my experience, the main obstacle to problem solving is an entrenched ideology. The great thing about making a movie or a piece of art is that that never comes into play. All the ideas are on the table. All the ideas and everything is open for discussion, and it turns out everybody succeeds by submitting to what the thing needs to be. Art, in my view, is a very elegant problem-solving model.

Now we finally arrive at the subject of this rant, which is the state of cinema. First of all, is there a difference between cinema and movies? Yeah. If I were on Team America, I’d say Fuck yeah! The simplest way that I can describe it is that a movie is something you see, and cinema is something that’s made. It has nothing to do with the captured medium, it doesn’t have anything to do with where the screen is, if it’s in your bedroom, your iPad, it doesn’t even really have to be a movie. It could be a commercial, it could be something on YouTube. Cinema is a specificity of vision. It’s an approach in which everything matters. It’s the polar opposite of generic or arbitrary and the result is as unique as a signature or a fingerprint. It isn’t made by a committee, and it isn’t made by a company, and it isn’t made by the audience. It means that if this filmmaker didn’t do it, it either wouldn’t exist at all, or it wouldn’t exist in anything like this form.

So, that means you can take a perfectly solid, successful and acclaimed movie and it may not qualify as cinema. It also means you can take a piece of cinema and it may not qualify as a movie, and it may actually be an unwatchable piece of shit. But as long as you have filmmakers out there who have that specific point of view, then cinema is never going to disappear completely. Because it’s not about money, it’s about good ideas followed up by a well-developed aesthetic. I love all this new technology, it’s great. It’s smaller, lighter, faster. You can make a really good-looking movie for not a lot of money, and when people start to get weepy about celluloid, I think of this quote by Orson Welles when somebody was talking to him about new technology, which he tended to embrace, and he said, “I don’t want to wait on the tool, I want the tool to wait for me”, which I thought was a good way to put it. But the problem is that cinema as I define it, and as something that inspired me, is under assault by the studios and, from what I can tell, with the full support of the audience. The reasons for this, in my opinion, are more economic than philosophical, but when you add an ample amount of fear and a lack of vision, and a lack of leadership, you’ve got a trajectory that I think is pretty difficult to reverse.

Now, of course, it’s very subjective; there are going to be exceptions to everything I’m going to say, and I’m just saying that so no one thinks I’m talking about them. I want to be clear: The idea of cinema as I’m defining it is not on the radar in the studios. This is not a conversation anybody’s having; it’s not a word you would ever want to use in a meeting. Speaking of meetings, the meetings have gotten pretty weird. There are fewer and fewer executives who are in the business because they love movies. There are fewer and fewer executives that know movies. So it can become a very strange situation. I mean, I know how to drive a car, but I wouldn’t presume to sit in a meeting with an engineer and tell him how to build one, and that’s kind of what you feel like when you’re in these meetings. You’ve got people who don’t know movies and don’t watch movies for pleasure deciding what movie you’re going to be allowed to make. That’s one reason studio movies aren’t better than they are, and that’s one reason that cinema, as I’m defining it, is shrinking.

Well, how does a studio decide what movies get made? One thing they take into consideration is the foreign market, obviously. It’s become very big. So that means, you know, things that travel best are going to be action-adventure, science fiction, fantasy, spectacle, some animation thrown in there. Obviously the bigger the budget, the more people this thing is going to have to appeal to, the more homogenized it’s got to be, the more simplified it’s got to be. So things like cultural specificity and narrative complexity, and, god forbid, ambiguity, those become real obstacles to the success of the film here and abroad.

Speaking of ambiguity, we had a test screening of Contagion once and a guy in the focus group stood up and he said, “I really hate the Jude Law character. I don’t know if he’s a hero or an asshole”. And I thought well, here we go. There’s another thing, a process known as running the numbers, and for a filmmaker this is kind of the equivalent of a doctor showing you a chest x-ray and saying there’s a shadow on it. It’s a kind of fungible algorithm that’s used when they want say no without, really, saying no. I could tell you a really good story of how I got pushed off a movie because of the way the numbers ran, but if I did, I’d probably get shot in the street, and I really like my cats.

So then there’s the expense of putting a movie out, which is a big problem. Point of entry for a mainstream, wide-release movie: $30 million. That’s where you start. Now you add another 30 for overseas. Now you’ve got to remember, the exhibitors pay half of the gross, so to make that 60 back you need to gross 120. So you don’t even know what your movie is yet, and you’re already looking at 120. That ended up being part of the reason why the Liberace movie didn’t happen at a studio. We only needed $5 million from a domestic partner, but when you add the cost of putting a movie out, now you’ve got to gross $75 million to get that 35 back, and the feeling amongst the studios was that this material was too “special” to gross $70 million. So the obstacle here isn’t just that special subject matter, but that nobody has figured out how to reduce the cost of putting a movie out. There have been some attempts to analyze it, but one of the mysteries is that this analysis doesn’t really reveal any kind of linear predictive behavior, it’s still mysterious the process whereby people decide if they’re either going to go to a movie or not go to a movie. Sometimes you don’t even know how you reach them. Like on Magic Mike for instance, the movie opened to $38 million, and the tracking said we were going to open to 19. So the tracking was 100% wrong. It’s really nice when the surprise goes in that direction, but it’s hard not to sit there and go how did we miss that? If this is our tracking, how do you miss by that much?

I know one person who works in marketing at a studio suggested, on a modestly budgeted film that had some sort of brand identity and some A-list talent attached, she suggested, “Look, why don’t we not do any tracking at all, and just spend 15 and we’ll just put it out”. They wouldn’t do it. They were afraid it would fail, when they fail doing the other thing all the time. Maybe they were afraid it was going to work. The other thing that mystifies me is that you would think, in terms of spending, if you have one of these big franchise sequels that you would say oh, we don’t have to spend as much money because is there anyone in the galaxy that doesn’t know Iron Man’s opening on Friday? So you would think, oh, we can stop carpet-bombing with TV commercials. It’s exactly the opposite. They spend more. They spend more. Their attitude is: You know, it’s a sequel, and it’s the third one, and we really want to make sure people really want to go. We want to make sure that opening night number is big so there’s the perception of the movie is that it’s a huge success. There’s that, and if you’ve ever wondered why every poster and every trailer and every TV spot looks exactly the same, it’s because of testing. It’s because anything interesting scores poorly and gets kicked out. Now I’ve tried to argue that the methodology of this testing doesn’t work. If you take a poster or a trailer and you show it to somebody in isolation, that’s not really an accurate reflection of whether it’s working because we don’t see them in isolation, we see them in groups. We see a trailer in the middle of five other trailers, we see a poster in the middle of eight other posters, and I’ve tried to argue that maybe the thing that’s making it distinctive and score poorly actually would stick out if you presented it to these people the way the real world presents it. And I’ve never won that argument.

You know, we had a trailer for Side Effects that we did in London and the filmmaking team really, really liked it. But the problem was that it was not testing well, and it was really not testing as well as this domestic trailer that we had. The point spread was so significant that I really couldn’t justify trying to jam this thing down distributor’s throats, so we had to abandon it. Now look, not all testing is bad. Sometimes you have to, especially on a comedy. There’s nothing like 400 people who are not your friends to tell you when something’s wrong. I just don’t think you can use it as the last word on a movie’s playability, or its quality. Magic Mike tested poorly. Really poorly. And fortunately Warner Brothers just ignored the test scores, and stuck with their plan to open the movie wide during the summer.

But let’s go back to Side Effects for a second. This is a movie that didn’t perform as well as any of us wanted it to. So, why? What happened? It can’t be the campaign because all the materials that we had, the trailers, the posters, the TV spots, all that stuff tested well above average. February 8th, maybe it was the date, was that a bad day? As it turns out that was the Friday after the Oscar nominations are announced, and this year there was an atypically large bump to all the films that got nominated, so that was a factor. Then there was a storm in the Northeast, which is sort of our core audience. Nemo came in, so God, obviously, is getting me back for my comments about monotheism. Was it the concept? There was a very active decision early on to sell the movie as kind of a pure thriller and kind of disconnect it from this larger social issue of everybody taking pills. Did that make the movie seem more commercial, or did it make it seem more generic? We don’t know. What about the cast? Four attractive white people… this is usually not an obstacle. The exit polls were very good, the reviews were good. How do we figure out what went wrong? The answer is: We don’t. Because everybody’s already moved on to the next movie they have to release.

Now, I’m going to attempt to show how a certain kind of rodent might be smarter than a studio when it comes to picking projects. If you give a certain kind of rodent the option of hitting two buttons, and one of the buttons, when you touch it, dispenses food 40% of the time, and one of the buttons when you touch it dispenses food 60% percent of the time, this certain kind of rodent very quickly figures out never to touch the 40% button ever again. So when a studio is attempting to determine on a project-by-project basis what will work, instead of backing a talented filmmaker over the long haul, they’re actually increasing their chances of choosing wrong. Because in my view, in this business which is totally talent-driven, it’s about horses, not races. I think if I were going to run a studio I’d just be gathering the best filmmakers I could find and sort of let them do their thing within certain economic parameters. So I would call Shane Carruth, or Barry Jenkins or Amy Seimetz and I’d bring them in and go, ok, what do you want to do? What are the things you’re interested in doing? What do we have here that you might be interested in doing? If there was some sort of point of intersection I’d go: Ok, look, I’m going to let you make three movies over five years, I’m going to give you this much money in production costs, I’m going to dedicate this much money on marketing. You can sort of proportion it how you want, you can spend it all on one and none on the other two, but go make something.

Now, that only works if you are very, very good at identifying talent. Real talent, the kind of talent that sustains. And you can’t be judging strictly on commercial performance, or hype, or hipness, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect someone running a multi-billion dollar business to be able to identify talent. I get it, it’s the studio, you need all kinds of movies. You need comedies, you need horror films, you need action films, you need animated films, I get it. But the point is, can’t some of these be cinema also? This is kind of what we tried to do with Section 8 is we tried to bring interesting filmmakers into the studio system and protect them. But unfortunately the only way a studio is going to allow that kind of freedom to a young filmmaker is if the budgets are low. And unfortunately the most profitable movies for the studios are going to be the big movies, the home runs. They don’t look at the singles or the doubles as being worth the money or the man hours. Psychologically, it’s more comforting to spend $60 million promoting a movie that costs 100, than it does to spend $60 million for a movie that costs 10. I know what you’re thinking: If it costs 10 you’re going to be in profit sooner. Maybe not. Here’s why: OK. $10 million movie, 60 million to promote it, that’s 70, so you’ve got to gross 140 to get out. Now you’ve got $100 million movie, you’re going spend 60 to promote it. You’ve got to get 320 to get out. How many $10 million movies make 140 million dollars? Not many. How many $100 million movies make 320? A pretty good number, and there’s this sort of domino effect that happens too. Bigger home video sales, bigger TV sales, so you can see the forces that are sort of draining in one direction in the business. So, here’s a thought… maybe nothing’s wrong. Maybe I’m a clown. Maybe the audiences are happy, and the studio is happy, and look at this from Variety:

“Shrinking release slates that focus on tentpoles and the emergence of a new normal in the home vid market has allowed the largest media congloms to boost the financial performance of their movie divisions, according to Nomura Equity research analyst Michael Nathanson”.

So, according to Mr. Nathanson, the studios are successfully cutting costs, the decline in home videos have plateaued, and the international box office, which used to be 50% of revenue is now 70%. With one exception in that all the stock prices of all the companies that own these studios are up. It would appear that all these companies are flush. So maybe nothing’s wrong, and I’ve got to tell you, this is the only arena in history in which trickle-down economics actually works, because when a studio is flush, they spend more money to make more money, because their stock price is all about market share. And you know, there’s no other business that’s this big, that’s actually this financially transparent. You have a situation here in which there is an objective economic value given to an asset. It’s not like that derivatives mortgage bullshit that just brought the world to its knees, you can’t say a movie made more money than it actually made, and internally, you can’t say that you didn’t spend what you spent on it. It’s contractual that you have to make these numbers available.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of waste. I think there are too many layers of executives, I don’t know why you should be having a lot of phone calls with people that can’t actually make decisions. They’ll violate their own rules on a whim, while they make you adhere to them. They get simple things wrong sometimes, like remakes. I mean, why are you always remaking the famous movies? Why aren’t you looking back into your catalog and finding some sort of programmer that was made 50 years ago that has a really good idea in it, that if you put some fresh talent on it, it could be really great. Of course, in order to do that you need to have someone at the studio that actually knows those movies. Even if you don’t have that person you could hire one. The sort of executive ecosystem is distorted, because executives don’t get punished for making bombs the way that filmmakers do, and the result is there’s no turnover of new ideas, there’s no new ideas about how to approach the business or how to deal with talent or material. But, again, economically, it’s a pretty straightforward business. Hell, it’s the third-biggest export that we have. It’s one of the few things that we do that the world actually likes.

I’ve stopped being embarrassed about being in the film business, I really have. I’m not spending my days trying to make a weapon that kills people more efficiently. It’s an interesting business. But again, taking the 30,000 foot view, maybe nothing’s wrong, and maybe my feeling that the studios are kind of like Detroit before the bailout is totally insupportable. I mean, I’m wrong a lot. I’m wrong so much, it doesn’t even raise my blood pressure anymore. Maybe everything is just fine. But… Admissions, this is the number of bodies that go through the turnstile, ten years ago: 1.52 billion. Last year: 1.36 billion. That’s a ten and a half percent drop. Why are admissions dropping? Nobody knows, not even Nate Silver. Probably a combination of things: Ticket prices, maybe, a lot of competition for eyeballs. There’s a lot of good TV out there. Theft is a big problem. I know this is a really controversial subject, but for people who think everything on the internet should just be totally free all I can say is, good luck. When you try to have a life and raise a family living off something you create…

There’s a great quote from Steve Jobs:

“From the earliest days of Apple I realized that we thrived when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole our software we’d be out of business. If it weren’t protected there’d be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear creative companies will disappear or never get started. But there’s a simpler reason: It’s wrong to steal. It hurts other people, and it hurts your own character”.

I agree with him. I think that what people go to the movies for has changed since 9/11. I still think the country is in some form of PTSD about that event, and that we haven’t really healed in any sort of complete way, and that people are, as a result, looking more toward escapist entertainment. And look, I get it. There’s a very good argument to be made that only somebody who has it really good would want to make a movie that makes you feel really bad. People are working longer hours for less money these days, and maybe when they get in a movie, they want a break. I get it.

But let’s sex this up with some more numbers. In 2003, 455 films were released. 275 of those were independent, 180 were studio films. Last year 677 films were released. So you’re not imagining things, there are a lot of movies that open every weekend. 549 of those were independent, 128 were studio films. So, a 100% increase in independent films, and a 28% drop in studio films, and yet, ten years ago: Studio market share 69%, last year 76%. You’ve got fewer studio movies now taking up a bigger piece of the pie and you’ve got twice as many independent films scrambling for a smaller piece of the pie. That’s hard. That’s really hard.

When I was coming up, making an independent film and trying to reach an audience I thought was like, trying to hit a thrown baseball. This is like trying to hit a thrown baseball – but with another thrown baseball. That’s why I’m spending so much time talking to you about the business and the money, because this is the force that is pushing cinema out of mainstream movies. I’ve been in meetings where I can feel it slipping away, where I can feel that the ideas I’m tossing out, they’re too scary or too weird, and I can feel the thing. I can tell: It’s not going to happen, I’m not going to be able to convince them to do this the way I think it should be done. I want to jump up on the table and scream, “Do you know how lucky we are to be doing this? Do you understand that the only way to repay that karmic debt is to make something good, is to make something ambitious, something beautiful, something memorable?” But I didn’t do that. I just sat there, and I smiled.

Maybe the ideas I had don’t work, and the only way they’ll find out is that someone’s got to give me half a billion dollars, to see if it’ll work. That seems like a lot of money, but actually in point of fact there are a couple movies coming down the pike that represent, in terms of their budgets and their marketing campaigns, individually, a half a billion dollars. Just one movie. Just give me one of these big movies. No? Kickstarter!

I don’t want to bring this to a conclusion on a down note. A few years back, I got a call from an agent and he said, “Will you come see this film? It’s a small, independent film a client made. It’s been making the festival circuit and it’s getting a really good response but no distributor will pick it up, and I really want you to take a look at it and tell me what you think.” The film was called Memento. So the lights come up and I think, It’s over. It’s over. Nobody will buy this film? This is just insane. The movie business is over. It was really upsetting. Well fortunately, the people who financed the movie loved the movie so much that they formed their own distribution company and put the movie out and made $25 million. So whenever I despair I think, OK, somebody out there somewhere, while we’re sitting right here, somebody out there somewhere is making something cool that we’re going to love, and that keeps me going. The other thing I tell young filmmakers is when you get going and you try to get money, when you’re going into one of those rooms to try and convince somebody to make it, I don’t care who you’re pitching, I don’t care what you’re pitching – it can be about genocide, it can be about child killers, it can be about the worst kind of criminal injustice that you can imagine – but as you’re sort of in the process of telling this story, stop yourself in the middle of a sentence and act like you’re having an epiphany, and say: You know what, at the end of this day, this is a movie about hope.

Thank you.

The opening of Apocalypse Now is a phantasmagorical  fusion of imagery and sound, a strange glimpse into the mind of its hero Willard (Martin Sheen); as The End by The Doors opens, helicopter rotors swoop slowly, hypnotically in from the corner of the audience’s perception, then behind, over a jungle canopy that bursts into flame, like a deadly flower. This opening sound medley came to be known as “The Ghost Helicopter Flyover”.

Director Francis Ford Coppola had always wanted the film to be an aural revolution, to properly reflect the first “rock n roll war”. He was fascinated by a quadraphonic recording of  Japanese composer Isao Tomita. Sound editor Walter Murch, designers Richard Beggs, Randy Thom and the rest of the sound team built their own Dolby split sound system, then had the mammoth task of editing around 236 miles of image and sound.

Beggs recalled, “Despite all the time they had spent over in the Philippines, nothing beyond the basic production track had been recorded in terms of jungle, hardware, weaponry, munitions, etc. The environment on the production was horrendous too, from a sound point of view, with noises on the locations ruining a lot of the track. So we created it all in post here in San Francisco.”

One of Murch’s first assignments was to construct the opening of the film, “a strange nightmare, which blended reality and imagination.” The sound designers created a “quintaphonic track” he said, “because there were three channels of sound from behind the screen and two channels emerging from behind the audience – a left rear and a right rear.” Not to mention the low frequency sound for explosions and so on. Beggs created the first helicopter heard on a Moog synthesizer.

Richard Beggs and Randy Thom discuss the sound design for this memorable opening, with some handy visual aids, here.