Breskin | Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation | E-Book | sack.de
E-Book

E-Book, Englisch, 410 Seiten

Breskin Inner Views: Filmmakers in Conversation

Expanded Edition
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4835-8197-2
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

Expanded Edition

E-Book, Englisch, 410 Seiten

ISBN: 978-1-4835-8197-2
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz



David Breskin is a fantastically talented interviewer: he has a knack for asking probing questions and the good sense to make sure his subjects answer them directly. He's assured enough not to be cowed by his famous interviewees, but humble enough to let them do most of the talking. Inner Views contains eight lengthy conversations that Breskin held with some of the most prominent modern film directors, many of them caught in the process of making their most important recent works. Francis Ford Coppola reveals the reasons for making The Godfather Part III after sixteen years of refusals. Oliver Stone traces his life from his earliest memories to the making of JFK. Spike Lee, fresh from the success of Do the Right Thing, talks about the meaning of that movie and of Jungle Fever, which followed it. Robert Altman waxes eloquently on his unique filmmaking process, particularly as it relates to The Player and Short Cuts. And Clint Eastwood, caught just before the release of Unforgiven, gives a lively overview of his career. Throw in engrossing conversations with David Lynch, David Cronenberg, and Tim Burton and you have a book that provides indispensable insight into the life and work of the world's most intriguing filmmakers.

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SESSION ONE In Godfather II, consigliere Tom Hagen, upon finding the dead prostitute, says, “The girl has no family. It’s as if she didn’t exist.” And he repeats it, like a mantra. It’s one sign of the centrality of family in your work — that family is how you do exist — so I’d like you to start by talking about yours. Well, I was born in 1939 and raised in a second-generation Italian American family, so my infant memories of World War II and that era were the first things to consider. Also, because my father was a musician, we traveled a lot. It was my father’s gypsy nature not to stay in any one place too long. We were always moving — we thought in regard to his career, but really it was his nature. Our moving every year and the many schools I went to because of it tended to let me encapsulate time differently. Because when I was five there was one set of friends and impressions, and that was very, very radically changed each time we moved. In some way it allowed me to remember things in a much more vivid way than kids who are just raised in one neighborhood. I went to twenty-five different schools before college. Each one was a little episode of my life — ages four, and five, and six, and seven — like a separate movie with a separate cast of characters. My childhood, and my memories of my childhood, have always remained very vital to me and very accessible. I may have only been in a particular neighborhood for six months, but I still remember what the pretty girl’s name was and what the bad boy’s name was. Those memories are more vivid for me than for other people, who are always amazed that I can remember this stuff. We were a family of five. An older brother five years older [Augie] and a younger sister six years younger [Talia Shire]. My mother [Italia] was an extremely good-looking woman and my father [Carmine] was very handsome, and in a glamorous profession — I saw him dress in a tuxedo. My initial memories of them were very idealized and very full of love. My brother was very nice to me, and we had all sorts of uncles and aunts in that sort of second-generation Italian family. My first impression of family was that it was very much like a fairy tale. And we were taught that Italians had great culture: that Meucci invented the telephone, and Fermi the first nuclear reactor, and Verdi, and so on. And my father was the solo flute player for Toscanini. So there was always an element of glamor and romance to my family, and to this day, if I do gravitate to them or they are the wellspring of my fondness, it’s because from when I was a little kid, they were. Yet there was a lot of tension there as well. Your father dominated the scene, and there was always the risk that he was failing or would fail. He was dissatisfied as an artist even if he was at a fairly high level. He was at a high level as an instrumentalist, but in those days it wasn’t like today, where a virtuoso flute player is on records and is a celebrity. He always had ambitions to write music and write songs, to do Broadway, to conduct opera. He longed for recognition in areas other than playing the flute. So he weaned himself off of that nice comfortable career as a symphonic instrumentalist and started to branch off into other areas. One was movies. In fact, when I was born he had just gotten back from Hollywood. He’d been there a couple of years and had tried to get started as a film scorer, making connections. There was a phone call from some musician friends — he heard that he was being fired off of his job — and so rather than deal with people thinking that he might have gotten fired, he left Hollywood and drove across the country to Detroit, and that’s why I was born there. So that was the flavor of the kind of family it was. Was his level of frustration, what he perceived as his failure, painful for you? Oh yeah. Yeah. Literally, when we said our prayers, at the end we said, “… and give Daddy his break.” Even before I knew what “his break” was. I thought it was the brake of the car! The way they saw things, getting your break was political — it was who you knew. Even to this day, I take great exception to this attitude. I always felt it was your talent and your willingness to keep working: if no one will hire you to do a play, then go do the play yourself anyway. A glancing difference between my father and me is that I feel talent can be realized by hard work and imaginative application. It’s not politics, it’s not who you know. It’s sort of ironic that he got his big break scoring your movies — he did know you. [Laughs.] I know. We were very involved in my father’s talent. That was the focus of our family. If I went to school and said my father was a soloist for Toscanini, people thought I was special, even though I was new in the neighborhood. He, during a very black period, threatened to put his hands into the lawn mower in your back yard. No. He, during a period, had an accident. He was mowing the lawn and was stupidly adjusting the mower and cut off the tips of his fingers. We took him immediately for plastic surgery, which he needed to keep playing the flute. I, later, always thought what a Freudian thing that was: that a man who hated the instrument, who thought the instrument had held him back, who resented it, had done that. You idolized your older brother, Augie [Nicolas Cage’s father]. He was older than you, better looking, smarter, more successful socially — but wasn’t it hard not to resent him for that? But he was always so kind to me. And so affectionate. And so generous. He didn’t have to take me to the movies, and introduce me to his friends. He was such a good older brother. Rather than be competitive with him, I just wanted to be like him. So my impression of my brother was always very golden. If anything, I was more concerned that one day I would have to look out for him. I didn’t want the bad kids to beat him up, so there was anxiety on that level. There’s a real sense of fraternal dynamics in your work — in even your first film, Dementia 13, through the Godfathers, to the Tulsa films — The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. By the time of Rumble Fish, dedicated to “Augie, brother and best teacher,” there’s a sense that the younger brother has to make his own mark, and throw off the influence of the older. Well, you know, I’m sure that I cannot give a clear picture of it. I can only tell you from my feeling. If my father wrote some music and people insulted it, it would really hurt me. If anything happened to my brother — he was always full of great schemes, he was like an Errol Flynn guy — my feeling was always not to get past him but to protect him, and to be like him. I had a dream when I was a little kid. It was so vivid that I never forgot it. The bad kids were putting my brother in a big manhole, and I was running to all the houses to get the phone. They were going to cover him. He was like a hero to me. And when I got a little older, more adolescent, he was so kind: he would tell me about life, about sex — which my family pretended didn’t exist; if you asked a question, you’d get hit — or he would tell me about books, or how to dress and be attractive to girls. And he would share his dreams with me, his crazy inventions. And I was trying to copy him. He would encourage me. He liked the fact that I was good at drama because I was sort of the black sheep of the family — they didn’t know what kind of profession I would go into. They would say I wasn’t college material. He would always stick up for me. Augie has said that you’ve often regretted your successes, because they were meant for him. Without a doubt. So that must have given a really bittersweet twist to the successes you’ve had. Definitely bittersweet. Augie’s always on the verge of some incredible success. I think he got trapped in the academic world, getting the Ph.D. It was a practical thing. He was the first one to get one in our family, but like for many people the academic world was a ticket to nowhere. I was lucky to get into drama, and when you do it for so many years you become expert at it. Yeah, but Francis, a lot of people get into drama and don’t do what you did — But he had all the same ingredients that I did. A lot of feeling, strong feelings, a lot of imagination and ideas. Willingness to work hard. He has all that. He just hasn’t found his niche — yet. But he was the prototype, the one who first looked towards creative literature, philosophy. Things I would have had no way to know, I knew because I had an older brother. You did something odd when you were fourteen, when you were working at Western Union that summer. You knew how much your father wanted “his break” from Hollywood, how much success meant to him, and yet you sent him a fraudulent telegram from Paramount Pictures telling him he’d been selected to score some big movie. It’s a true story. I delivered the telegram. And it was only after doing it and seeing how happy he was that we were going to go back to California, that I began to sweat, and realized, “My God, how am I going to tell him?” And I told him and he was very disappointed. I thought I could just give him his break. Kids are sensitive to what’s wrong with their parents. And I wanted my father to get that telegram, and I wanted my family to get that telegram, so that he would be happy and we would be happy. But you...



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