“The studio didn’t like the title, they wanted me to use Addie Prey… I called Orson Welles in Rome…
What do you think of this title: Paper Moon.
That title is so good you don’t even need to release the picture, just release the title!”
“Spielberg is so adept at putting the viewer through the wringer. He doesn’t just objectively play out a scene. He engages the viewer directly, and makes them experience the same emotions as his characters.”
“This is how I began. It has to stay simple. That’s something that stays in my mind, in the number one place- this has to stay simple. It can’t get complicated.” – Stan Brakhage
“Oh, I lie now and then. Sometimes I’d tell them the truth and they still wouldn’t believe me, so I prefer to lie.” – The 400 Blows
“Any decision that you will make, it will be forever. And if you fail, and if you make a bad decision, or a bad line or a scene doesn’t work- one single scene and if it’s a piece of shit, you will never be able to take it out because it’s an endless spaghetti, you know what I mean, so you can be choked” – Alejandro G. Iñárritu
“Before the sun comes up I would wake up. I start with a full bucket of ideas. Mid-day I’m half, by the end of the day I’m defeated and I’m just ready to give up. For one, I think [inspiration] is an intersection of a few things. I would start songs by being inspired by sound, sound design, places, things, the setting was important. And then somehow the song would start to emerge from that setting.” – Trent Reznor
Cairns examines Tati’s use of reflections and mirror images, as well as the illusion of space, which all play into the rigidity of the film’s expansive set pieces and its fractured narrative.
In this day and age, it’s difficult to make a living in America as an artist of any kind — or even if you want to write about it. Scott Timberg’s new book Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class (Yale University Press) looks deeply into the state of the culture sphere, and how it’s squeezing out both the middlebrow and the middle class.
Heart of Darkness would not be the last time an Orson Welles film would fall apart. The artist’s career was littered with unrealized projects – a movie version of the life of Chris was to have been the immediate follow-up to Citizen Kane, with Welles playing Jesus.
There’s an entire constellation of cult and indie stars, filmmakers who came of age in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, who have either vanished from the current scene or are struggling to maintain a place within it. How many of that generation’s auteurs have we lost?