Smiley, Tavis. "Melvin Van Peebles". Tavis Smiley. PBS. 27 May 2004. .

After some bantering where Melvin reveals he is actually “Sir Melvin” (“brother from the south side of Chicago has been knighted”), Tavis Smiley begins the interview with Melvin Van Peebles and his son Mario. Tavis asks Mario what it was like growing up in the shadow of his father, who responds saying that Melvin “never though being successful would make him forget his blackness…who he is.” They discuss Melvin growing up in an institution/industry where he is “mad at the system but not mad at the people.” Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song was therefore an indictment of the system but not necessarily everyone who functions within that system. Melvin acknowledges that all the film unions were all-white and he sought to make a film that utilizes people of all races in spite of the singular racial perspective portrayed in Sweetback. Next they talk about Mario’s film New Jack City (1991) and Mario confides that since the studio heads are all white, it’s tough to pitch a movie with complex non-white characters. More often than not, studio heads use black characters in simple way (i.e. comic relief or subservience). Thus, most of the Van Peebles’ films are done by racially mixed crews and funded by black producers. They move on to Mario losing his virginity on screen in Sweetback’s beginning at 13 years old, which Mario says was a great experience (he kept asking for retakes). The conversation continues about the paternal link between Melvin, Mario, and now Mario’s kids in his recent biopic of his father, Baadasssss (2003). After discussing how they make due with limited resources and time (Sweetback was shot in 19 days “without technology), they finish by talking about how to promote a controversial movie nobody wants to advertise.

This interview was very interesting to read because it shed light not only on some of the feelings behind the controversial production of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, but also illustrated the father-son relationship between Melvin and Mario Van Peebles. Sweetback is a film that is meant to affect the younger generation, instilling them with a sense of pride and refusal to tolerate intolerance. As this interview demonstrates, Melvin instilled his son with a sense of purpose and duty, not only to his family and race, but to under-privileged, under-utilized film crews as well. Although the character of Sweetback ultimately becomes a loner, it was the production of that film that brought people together in order to challenge society and the Hollywood system with new, provocative images and stories.  As Melvin said, it was the system, not the people, that needed to be directly confronted.

Hitchcock, Alfred. Interview with Bryan Forbes. BFI. 1967. 8 Apr. 2008 http://www.bfi.org.uk/features/interviews/hitchcock.html.

    This interview begins with thoughtful questions asked by another director who is clearly a fan of Hitchcock's work. Through thoughtful questions, Hitchcock is encouraged to discuss his script-writing process. For example, we learn that Hitchcock planned the Mount Rushmore scene fifteen years prior to North by Northwest, and simply waited for an opportunity to insert the scene. He also speaks of his fan of the montage technique, and how greater emotions are brought forth by the audience's emotional attachment to the actors. Using humor and wordplay, Hitchcock adeptly keeps the interest of the audience as he discusses his thought processes and motivations behind the stylistic elements he is famous for using.  Much of the interview is devoted to specific stylistic decisions in his films, but even these can be viewed as representative of Hitchcock's overall strategy as a director.

    It is clear from this interview that Hitchcock operates in a very casual manner, and despite the widespread belief that he adamantly enforces his own view of the film it appears he is sometimes willing to make concessions. Also, here Hitchcock gives interesting evidence about why he often picks big celebrities to act in his films. Because his beliefs closely resemble the founder of the montage Eisenstein in that the key goal of a montage is to create emotion, Hitchcock insists on using actors that the audience will have an emotional attachment to. He believes that an actor such as Cary Grant will receive greater sympathy from the audience, and thus the heightened emotion will ultimately lead to greater suspense and enjoyment of the moviegoers. It is through this interview that one is offered a rare glimpse into the thoughts of Hitchcock. As is the case with any director, certain parts of his style can be analyzed simply by viewing the films he has created. It is through this, for example, that we are aware of Hitchcock's use of visual impact rather dialogue to drive the plot forward. However, to truly understand him one must venture beyond the work he has produced and instead take a more direct approach to deciphering his beliefs and motivations.

Bachman, Gideon and Federico Fellini. “A Guest in My Own Dreams: An Interview with Federico Fellini.”Film Quarterly. Vol. 47, No. 3, Spring. 1994, 2-15. JSTOR University of California Press. University of Pennslvania Library, Philadelphia. 4 April 2008 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1212955>

Gideon Bachmann’s interview covers several Fellini films and discusses his process in making a film. Fellini admits to often being the inspiration for the main characters in his films. He agrees that there are loose references to his life when his films are within a specific stretch of time and cover certain contexts. He says he gives to the characters in his films to establish a more accurate representation of real life. Fellini talks about fascism as a type of strain on his childhood. American films were a relief as a child, because they were a break from the lies of the church and the fascist dictatorship. He called reality “completely falsified” under fascism. As a child, he was forced to confine to the fascist ideal and lost all freedom and honesty. He had to avoid things that were forbidden. Fascism had a way over most children his age, who believed that war was the key to living and they dreamed of dying in war.

This interview puts forth Fellini’s opinions of fascism and it reveals the characters of his films as being forms of himself, throughout his life. The main character in his film Amarcord is also a loose version of himself. His distaste for fascism is evident not only in this interview, but also in Amarcord, where fascism is mocked and ridiculed for its absurdity.

    Andrew Sarris' introduction to book, A Hard Day's Night: A Complete Pictorial Record of the Movie, tells the story of how this 1964 comedy changed pop culture and how "nothing would ever be the same again."  Sarris discusses what it was in particular that made this film so revolutionary.  In his opinion, the score for one thing "surpass[ed] in emotional lucidity and melodic invention every other musical show of the sixties from every medium."  Sarris doesn't stop with the music, however.  He goes on to comment on the revolutionary filming style used in the film that differentiated it from all of its predecessors.  "The success of the film is attributable not only to the Beatles and their music, but to a genuinely modern style of film making.  Even at the time I was aware that A Hard Day's Night would turn out to be the Citizen Kane of jukebox musicals, a brilliant crystallization of such diverse cultural hand held camera, frenzied cutting, the cult of the sexless sub-adolescent, the semi-documentary, and studied spontaneity."  In addition to this introduction, however, the book includes a lenghty interview with Richard Lester, the film's director.  In the interview, details of the film are revealed and we can learn what the motivations were behind many of the scenes and characters.

    In the interview, Lester claims "the general aim of the film was to present what was apparently becoming a social phenomenon in this country."  This quote is the root of my thesis: that A Hard Day's Night was the first film to successfully unite the pop cultures of film and music and therefore was the first true rock and roll film.  The movie was made with the intention of portraying the social phenomenon on screen, and Lester chose to do this by capturing the unscripted essence of the "Fab Four."  "I think the classic example of this is the boys playing in the field.  It says in the script, "Ringo... fire escape... space." [...] It doesn't say what they are going to be doing."  Lester's reflexion on the loose filming process is further evidence that this film was intended to portray The Beatles, not a fictional set of characters in a fictional world in the same way the Elvis films did, for example.  This new approach at filming a musical is what led A Hard Day's Night to be so influential.

 

Excerpts from the 5th ediction of the book by John L. Coulehan, M.D. and Marian L. Block,M.D..

Learning Module 1 of Improving Oncologists' Communication Skills.

By Philip D Welsby, Consultant in Infectious Diseases, Head of Communication Studies for Third Year Edinburgh medical students.

Kelleher discusses with Christopher Nolan the inspirations, challenges, and business tactics involved in conceiving, creating, and selling Memento. Nolan stresses the importance of familiarizing his actors and crew with the unorthodox structure of the film and gaining their support of the logic of the piece. The director reveals his obsession with denying the audience the same knowledge that the protagonist is denied, which he achieved by establishing a solid reason why the plot is out of sequence early in the film. He discusses the dynamic between the film and the audience, and the demands it places on the viewer. Due to the incoherent narrative and thematic structure of the film, it requires more attention to detail and a certain degree of cynicism about what is going to be demanded logically, challenging the viewer to try to poke holes in the film. . Nolan also discusses the differences between pitching a mainstream movie to investors and selling a smaller independent psychological thriller. In the latter case, the filmmaker argues, the features of the film that seem risky are actually selling points at the early stage because they distinguish the material its more extreme, daring, and unconventional angles get the project noticed. Kelleher also probes Nolan on how his films compare to earlier classics like Howard Hawks. The Big Sleep and Roman Polanski.s Chinatown. Nolan recognizes such movies as intensely complex to the point of leaving the audience with the illusion of fully understanding the plot, yet completely unable to describe it. He contrasts this to Memento, which had the opposite goal in terms of telling a very simple story in an incredibly complex fashion, leaving the audience with complete uncertainty rather than an illusion of understanding.

In this captivating interview, Creative Screenwriting journalist Daniel Argent speaks with Christopher Nolan about the making of the brain-bending, dis-linear modern noir Memento. Nolan discusses the revelatory nature of his research on memory in the process of writing the screenplay and its existential self-reflexivity in terms of his own thoughts and assumptions. Even with his peculiar memory condition, Memento's protagonist has a subliminal knowledge of things without being aware of how he knows what he knows. Nolan attributes this assumption of knowledge to the notion of instinctive behavior, which the protagonist resorts to in his efforts to continuously and habitually remind himself that he has no short-term memory. Argent probes Nolan on the much-debated question of what the objective truth in the film is, which the filmmaker has repeatedly avoided giving away. Nolan stresses the importance of the audience understanding that he had to have, in his own mind, an idea of what the supposedly objective facts were in order to construct a consistent story that lends itself to multiple subjective interpretations. His intention was to place the audience in the position of someone without short-term memory and remain true to that until the end, unlike many other films that sell out the terms of storytelling towards the end of a film regardless of how daring they've been up to that point. This allows Nolan to create a useful character for highlighting this very human dilemma, providing a profound commentary on the leap-of-faith nature of everyday life. The filmmaker also discusses the challenges of reconciling the protagonist's view of his own condition and the events that actually unfold. Nolan believes this tension brings a more realistic degree of complexity to the situation and to the issues of memory and identity. The director also shares what his days as a cameraman on corporate training videos have taught him about the importance of not lying in film the questionable and the unreliable are only fascinating, he asserts, when they stem from a character's organic reason to be questionable or unreliable. He also points out the liberating aspect of his protagonist's condition, which allows you to forget, as well as makes you forget, enabling him to create comforting half-truths. Nolan also discusses his own peculiarities his upbringing as the double-identity child of parents from two different cultures, his habit of reading magazines back to front as deterministic elements of his relationship with film and storytelling.

Nolan discusses his creative process and his techniques for keeping Memento's complicated plot under control through reordering his writing and using the tight logical filters of his actors. He analyzes the relationship between the screenplay and his brother Jonathan's short story it was based on. Nolan talks about the film's cleverly manipulated promotional website, www.otnemem.com, which was created by his brother and aimed to give audiences a three-dimensional narrative where they can view information in the order that seems the most interesting, following lines of thought by using items and objects from both the film and the short story. The website thus provides a fascinating link between the two works in a way that allows people to make sense of both on their own terms. Nolan also discusses the differences in how he approached the structures of Memento and his 1999 film Following, both of which are non-linear, but while Memento runs backwards, the script for Following was written chronologically and later reordered to fit the structural conceit Nolan wanted. The filmmaker talks about what initially attracted him to the concept for Memento and the metaphorical potential the protagonist's condition provides. He discusses the concept of revenge and how the inability to remember affects it, raising the question of whether revenge exist in any real sense outside of one's own head, or whether it is merely personal satisfaction with no value beyond that. Nolan admits his preference for the noir genre, which allows for more three-dimensional characters based on the historical model of defining a character through action, as opposed to most other film genres where characterization comes through dialogue and narrative. He also argues the noir genre is better suited for the non-linear structure and the audience is more accepting of it this way. Nolan discusses the advantage the thriller writer has over the audience in terms of having a year to write the screenplay, as opposed to the 90 minutes the audience has to digest it. He stresses the importance of understanding and not abusing this advantage, which led him to continually simplify Memento throughout the writing process, avoiding the danger of making the cognitive load of this already incredibly dense film intolerably burdensome for the viewer.

In this interview by Erika Milvy of Salon Entertainment, Roberto Benigni addresses several of the controversies surrounding his award winning film, Life is Beautiful.  Milvy explains that while the film received several bad reviews, it still swept the Italian version of the Oscars and was invited by the Jerusalem Film Festival to screen a film that “further[ed] the universal understanding of Jewish History.”    Benigni insists that the film was never intended to “be offensive with the memory of the Holocaust.”  Instead his goal was “to same something poetic” and “to make a beautiful movie.”

On the film’s creative process, Benigni says he feared the film’s bad reception, but kept returning to the idea of “a happy man in a concentration camp.” He admits that his father was the inspiration for the film as he was a soldier in the Italian army during World War II who was captured and put in a German work camp.  He remembers his father describing his past “in a very funny way”, like a “fable” in order to protect him. Moreover, the film’s slapstick comedy is an homage to Benigni’s comic predecessor, Charlie Chaplin, his “Michelangelo.”

On the issue of the film’s representation of the Holocaust, Benigni says he consulted with Milan’s Italian Jewish Committee.  Still, he insists that the film never intended to be realistic, rather the film only hints at the horrors of the concentration camp, because “we know.”  Overall, Benigni speaks of this film as his masterpiece, “a gift from heaven.”

This article is an interview with Francis Ford Coppola about his career as a film Director, specifically regarding the making of The Godfather.  It begins with some general background about Coppola, and how he wanted to get away from big time Hollywood.  He struggled greatly, and despite not particularly wanting to take on Mario Puzo’s adaptation of his successful novel, he ended up doing so because his own film company was in great financial distress.

At the time Coppola was a film student who had been approached to do a feature film, which was impressive in itself. However, most people in Hollywood did not believe the film would be successful, so they wanted it done cheaply. Coppola wanted to turn down the film especially having read Puzo’s book which he found to be rather sleazy, but George Lucas convinced him that they needed the money if he ever hoped to direct The Conversation.

Admittedly, Coppola knew nothing about the mafia save the few films and books he has once viewed and read.  He did however, tear up the book and annotate it like crazy once he had accepted the job so as to familiarize himself with all of the relevant information he would need to successfully create this film.

Coppola then discusses how he was highly opposed to have Robert Redford play the part of Michael because he very clearly did not have the coloring to play a Sicilian which, for this mafia based movie, was very important.  The entire Italian-American immigrant aspect of the film was in many ways central to understanding the family, which is why Coppola pushed for Al Pacino, who was the young actor, at the time, who he had pictured playing the part.  Part of the opposition there, however, was that Pacino was short and Michael was supposed to be a tough guy, but Coppola supported Pacino’s acting skills.

Then Coppola tells the story of how he managed to get Marlon Brando to do the part of Don Corleone, after Brando had already turned down a previous script of his.

This article is an interview with Francis Ford Coppola about his career as a film Director, specifically regarding the making of The Godfather.  It begins with some general background about Coppola, and how he wanted to get away from big time Hollywood.  He struggled greatly, and despite not particularly wanting to take on Mario Puzo’s adaptation of his successful novel, he ended up doing so because his own film company was in great financial distress.

At the time Coppola was a film student who had been approached to do a feature film, which was impressive in itself. However, most people in Hollywood did not believe the film would be successful, so they wanted it done cheaply. Coppola wanted to turn down the film especially having read Puzo’s book which he found to be rather sleazy, but George Lucas convinced him that they needed the money if he ever hoped to direct The Conversation.

Admittedly, Coppola knew nothing about the mafia save the few films and books he has once viewed and read.  He did however, tear up the book and annotate it like crazy once he had accepted the job so as to familiarize himself with all of the relevant information he would need to successfully create this film.

Coppola then discusses how he was highly opposed to have Robert Redford play the part of Michael because he very clearly did not have the coloring to play a Sicilian which, for this mafia based movie, was very important.  The entire Italian-American immigrant aspect of the film was in many ways central to understanding the family, which is why Coppola pushed for Al Pacino, who was the young actor, at the time, who he had pictured playing the part.  Part of the opposition there, however, was that Pacino was short and Michael was supposed to be a tough guy, but Coppola supported Pacino’s acting skills.

Then Coppola tells the story of how he managed to get Marlon Brando to do the part of Don Corleone, after Brando had already turned down a previous script of his.