What is Cinema? (2013) Movie Script
1
We have this technology.
But what do you do with it?
You use it all,
it's part of the vocabulary
and to catch that truth of that moment, that's the
challenge.
What I like is not to arrive
at a clear and obvious conclusion,
but to leave you, the audience, stuff
to go away and argue about, um,
ponder about, reflect on,
rather than for it all to be tied up
so that you can go away and
forget the whole thing.
But sometimes,
you'll find that, um,
a film is looked at solely
for its content without any regard
to the style or manner in
which the story is told.
After all, that basically
is the art of the cinema.
Films, cinema,
cinema, it's contagious.
There is something in you
that-that-that needs it.
That need...
And you are driven to it.
You-you-you-you're pulled
into it.
My drug was movies.
Like reading poetry that makes
you want to... to-to also write poetry.
- Humanity, in-in order not to go... go nuts in
contemporary civilization,
which is very boring,
they need some entertainment,
They need something.
- It's... it's...
- They function the same as drugs.
We are almost at the point
where it's like a end of a circle
where people used to sit
and smoke and relax
and see images that
project into that smoke, and now,
after a series of many different technologies,
motion pictures,
video, computers, digital,
we are dreaming already about
implanting something in the eye,
in the brain.
It's like a big tree with small,
tiny branches and-and huge,
huge branches where...
and huge epics and-and little haiku.
The challenge, you see...
of my own challenge and every...
Everyone to watch in every art
is you just go,
like, to-to catch the essence.
You can call it hard, but usually
that's an essential moment
that you... that is... So much in it that
you want to go back again and again
to see or to listen or to experience,
to help you not to go crazy
or to go crazy in some other way.
It's so beautiful, cinema.
Cinema can go deep or it can go shallow
and I think the great films, uh,
tell a story, a surface story,
but the great cinema goes deep
into the psyche
and these undercurrents
are caught on deeper levels.
It can get abstract and conjure something in a
person
that can only be conjured
through this language of cinema.
The real gift is when you
get an idea,
it comes in a spark and you
see it and you feel it and you hear it.
If you get the elements correct, uh,
the thing will dig into a person
and they'll-they'll have this experience.
It can conjure a kind of a knowing,
even though it's abstract.
It's-It's real magical.
If the picture is giant
and the sound is beautiful
and the people are quiet and
they get into this world,
it's very, very delicate
how you get into that world,
it can be broken with
the wrong sound,
it can be broken
with a stupid little screen,
it can be broken with people
making noises in the theater.
It's so delicate, but if you get
into that world, it can be like a dream.
You're not only an observer, but you
can get caught up in that world
and it can become very real.
In dreams, logic goes out
the window and yet you understand it.
There's a thing
called imagination,
but I think imagination
is just ideas flowing.
I always equate it to fishing.
You can't take credit
for a beautiful little trout,
uh, but you can really appreciate it
when you catch one.
- I'm so glad you didn't give the center over to
the aisle, this is really good.
Good.
I just remember,
you know, a lot of people saying...
I've never seen kind of... these
kinds of films ever, just...
And I see yours and
I'm kind of, "Whoa, what is this?"
- Good.
These movies are,
you know, thoughts.
They're stores of memory.
And they only matter to us because
they strike sparks with that stuff.
- I'm very, very inspired.
- You don't have much
of a choice.
You have to... You have to do it.
You know, we have to...
persevere.
So what'd you
think of the audience?
Did they like the movie...
They got it?
- Yeah.
No one walked out that I know.
You just have to really
be afflicted with it, really.
- I'm interested
in alternative film form.
I'm really interested in what
the medium itself can do.
What I'm looking
for in film is to get...
an enhanced understanding, an enhanced
access to the world.
- It's diminishing, the amount of interest there is
in this kind of cinema, I think,
but there's still
a hardcore group of people
that still appreciate it.
- And there's young people
who are coming up
who are really interested in it.
- I'm not gonna, like,
blanket-say Meryl Streep can't fit into it.
- That dingo took my baby!
Took my baby... My baby!
- Bun apptit.
- If I juxtaposition
or remake it in a certain way,
maybe it could fit in
this category.
- All al... alone.
All al... alone.
All al...
We distribute films that
are not for the mass media.
Hollywood has a formulaic,
a beginning, a middle
and an end.
If I go see
the "Twilight" series, it-it...
The vampires isn't even
a vampire.
He won't sleep with the girl
because, uh, he's Mormon or something.
I look for the deepest part of
the human psyche,
what cannot be expressed in words
and what is, um, sometimes
graphic and explicit and painful,
but it's what we all have in common, what makes
us human.
- I think we're seeing
an experimental film
from maybe the '60s,
but I can't really place it.
I see a lot of, sort of, Andy Warhol
factory-types.
I tend to sort of prefer my
cinema to have a little bit of story.
I feel like that's important.
I have, uh, an iPhone and I can just sit
there and record and record
and, um, that
doesn't make it cinematic.
It just makes it a $300 item
that records video.
You have to bring a
little bit more to the show
if you want to
be called cinema, I feel.
All al...
We're part of the counterculture,
that idea of outside the mainstreams
and it still applies today.
It can be any form,
it can be any content.
It's personal vision.
Anyone can make a film.
- To me, the-the basis of, uh,
motion pictures is the experience
and the narrative can be
part of the-the-the, uh...
the experience, but it's-it's that you-you
as the viewer experience something
in-in time.
A great movie, um, stand
up under repeated viewings
And that once you know the story,
you're free in a way to get deeper
into other parts of the-of the experience.
There's a lot more than, uh,
than-than-than just the plot.
- You don't go to bed deciding what you're gonna
dream and make, uh, notes,
I will dream this.
You know, you don't
need a script, you dream.
And the dreams can be very vivid,
and you know, utterly necessary.
And I felt that way about-about
the filmmaking,
that if I-if I had a story to tell,
it-it would make itself known.
And the powerful thing about
motion pictures
is that it's an experience which hundreds of
thousands, millions of people
can-can share, although it's not
going to be identical in every case,
and that-that, to me, is
not the same thing
as-as saying that they're
all, um, following the same story.
There's nothing intrinsic
in motion pictures
that demands a
narrative and a case could be made
that the narrative element
is, uh, secondary
to many other
things in the movie.
- The best scripts don't
make the best films,
you know, because
they have that kind of literary,
you know, narrative thing, you know, that you're
sort of a slave to.
The best films, you know,
are the ones that aren't, like,
tied to that slavishly, so, um...
so I don't know, the whole narrative thing, it just
seems to me like, you know,
you don't-you don't first think
of the story of the song
and then make the song,
you know, it has to come out
of the... that moment,
you know, and that's what film has,
it's just that moment which is holy.
- I was in and out of the
holy moment, looking at you.
Can't be in a holy...
you're unique that way, Caveh.
That's one of the reasons
I enjoy you.
You can bring me into that.
Let's see, now, I have a
sample of her handwriting here.
Oh, yes.
Here we are.
Has an interesting address.
When I say that I'm
not interested in content, uh,
it's, uh, it would be the same as
a painter worrying about
whether the apples that he's
painting, whether they're sweet or sour.
Who cares?
It's his style, his
manner of painting them.
We have a rectangular screen
in a movie house.
Now, this rectangular screen has got
to be filled with a succession of images.
Any art form is there for
the artist to interpret it
in his own way and
thus create an emotion.
I wish I knew how to quit you.
- You just don't
belong in my world, Bella.
- I belong with you.
- My name is Maximus Decimus
Meridius.
And I will have my vengeance.
- Can't you see it's impossible?
- No.
- In dealing with
high emotion of jealousy
and, uh all of the melodramatic
elements, betrayals and all
this kind of stuff, I was
very aware of-of dealing with a genre,
but, uh, because I didn't use actors,
I used, uh, dancers who had no
acting ability at all.
One way of describing my
relation to making art of any kind
is, uh, batting my head against
the wall of, uh, familiar practices.
- I'd like to kick your ass in.
- It's a Brechtian idea
of disrupting the spectators'
identification, uh,
and making them aware that they're seeing
something that is constructed.
Sherman, is that you?
Shut up back there.
Now, you keep your body there.
One, two.
I was making a kind of dance
that wasn't involved with stories
or topical issues and
the second wave of feminism came along
and the possibilities of film
seemed so much more...
open and, uh, extended than
what I was able to do with-with dance.
- Court jesters were
always male.
Even as fools,
they were accorded dignity.
But when a woman plays the fool,
she's made to feel like an idiot.
There's no dignity
in the role for us.
I never expected
a mass audience.
I mean, I go to some of my
screenings and the only reason I stay
is to see when people
will leave.
"Jeanne Dielman" was a
very radical film for its time.
She was telling a story, in a
very attenuated way,
about the disillusion
of the main character.
- Of course, we were all influenced
by feminism and its, uh, its protest
against the, uh, inequities
in social and private life.
There is no way the image of a
woman could, uh, be, uh, represented
without it being sexualized.
This male gaze was
something to be analyzed...
Beginning with the director then
the, uh, the male character.
The woman's body was a landscape
through which the man passed
and controlled.
- Here's looking at you, kid.
- This is one night you're
not turning me out.
- This your girl?
- I'm my mother's girl.
You know, it still goes on.
We are bombarded
by images of women's bodies
and it's an ongoing struggle
to deal with that
in art-making of all kinds.
- Wh-what's this?
Heavy underwear.
Sorry about that.
- Cinema is
the sexiest thing possible.
First of all, you're dealing with
the issue of control and passivity.
The person behind the camera
ostensibly has control,
the person in front of the camera
is supposedly the subjective,
or the object,
and so there's a little dance.
But I absolutely believe that
everything in life is political.
For me, anything that you
turn the camera onto
is, in essence, a documentation.
Brother to brother,
brother to brother.
Brother to brother,
brother to brother.
Brother to brother,
brother to brother.
Brother to brother,
brother to brother.
Brother to brother,
brother to brother.
Brother to brother,
brother to brother.
Something very
powerful about sitting in a dark theater
with a few hundred people, mostly
strangers, and the audience,
though they are not really communicating with
each other,
they do affect each other and-and
it becomes sort of a collective force.
I asked Corporal Henderson
of the United States Marine Corps
to join me on Capitol Hill
to see how many members
of Congress we could convince
to enlist their children
to go to Iraq.
Congressman?
Michael Moore...
How are you doing?
- How are you today?
- Good, good.
I'm trying to get
members of Congress
to get their kids to enlist in the army
and go over to Iraq.
Congressman?
Congressman... Congressman?
Congressman Doolittle.
- Oh, no...
- I'm wondering if...
- I believe movies, especially documentaries
should have a point of view
and the filmmaker should be honest
about their point of view.
Should believe in something.
If I was making a movie about
women getting the right to vote,
you know, well, Mike,
you didn't...
You didn't put in those people that thought
women shouldn't be voting.
Yeah, that's right.
Paco.
Raymond.
T-Tania...
Todd.
I consider my documentaries
to be dramatic films.
What's the theme of the film?
What's the heartbeat
of the film?
You know, we forget that
someday, this is gonna be over.
Someday, there's gonna be
no such thing as AIDS.
Our most precious jewel.
- John.
- Our most beautiful son.
John Anthony.
- Johnny boy.
- Johnny boy.
- If it works as a story,
if it engages the viewer, um,
if it makes sense to the viewer, if it moves the
viewer, informs, uh,
I want it to work
for anybody who sees it.
And we love him so much.
We love him so much.
I didn't drop napalm,
but I dropped other things just as bad.
And people would suffer.
They would-they would live, but they
would suffer, you know,
then often they would die afterwards.
And this would cause people to
have to take care of them, you know?
But I look at my children now
and, uh, I don't know what
would happen if...
what I would think
about if someone napalmed...
Some of the great films that were
documentaries that I saw
were very inspiring because I saw
things that I couldn't see anyplace else.
Come on now!
Everybody, just cool out!
- You okay, Jim?
- Yes, Johnny!
- Huh?
What are you doing, Jim?
What do you do
for a living, Jason?
- I hustle.
I'm a stone whore.
And I'm not ashamed of it.
Of course, we are challenging
nature itself.
And it hits back.
It just hits back, that's all.
And I wouldn't see anything
"erotical" here,
I would see fornication
and asphyxiation and choking
and fighting for survival
and growing and...
Just rotting away.
You don't remember?
- This isn't a deposition, sir.
I was polite enough to
give you time.
Foolishly, I now see.
You have three more minutes.
Give it your best shot.
I don't have a lot of, uh, highfalutin
hopes for movies
or anything, really,
changing the world these days,
although I-I do remain
an optimist.
Excuse me.
Excuse me.
Uh, where are you guys going?
- We're going
up to the 14th floor.
- Do you have an appointment?
- No, we're gonna try and
see Roger Smith.
- No, you're not.
You're not gonna get
on one of those elevators.
- Why is that?
- If you don't have an appointment, you're not
going up to 14.
- Well, can we go up and
try and make an appointment?
- No.
.Why?
- I need Tony or Denise.
- And the reason to talk
to Roger Smith would be?
- Uh, Michael Moore.
- No, what's your reason for
seeing Roger Smith?
- Excuse me, I need to see you.
- Um, we're doing...
We're making a film.
Cinema is a way to sort of...
to take a look at the world
in which we live and make
it writ large so that the audience
watching the film
becomes part of it.
And they do become part of it.
- People used to talk
to me about "Z" so much,
almost 45 years ago.
The fact that the few
movies succeed, survive,
I think the only explanation I have
is that the director and
the actors and everybody
give so much passion to
make that movie
and its passion remains, survives.
Everyone finally has a vision of
the movie, has a vision of the scene,
so the important thing is to bring everybody to
go to the director's vision.
We don't do in a kind of political
speech or university speech.
I would like the audience
to feel it much more than see it.
I believe the story's most important,
with a good style, of course.
- Photography does
not create eternity as art does.
It embalms time, rescuing it simply
from its proper corruption.
Viewed in this perspective,
the cinema is objectivity and time.
For the French film critic Andr Bazin, the
invention of photography
and cinema were revolutionary because
for the first time in human history,
we could record and therefore capture and hold
an actual moment in time.
For him, this was
revolutionary, not least because,
even though a director chooses
what to film,
can put the film images in any
order and then alter them in any way,
nonetheless, there is that direct contact with an
original moment in time.
And for Bazin, what we see
on screen only exists in relation
to everything that's
not on screen.
Cinema suggests
as much as it reveals.
- So, finally you watch
the movie.
There is nothing...
you create the universe.
The movie is not reality.
It's based on the real,
but it's not reality.
The art's... much
too longer, much too complex.
The important thing is to give the audience the
elements
they can understand the story
and what the story is meaning.
So, the way you do it
I don't really know.
I don't know.
He is totally trusting
himself and the material.
He winds up with some of
the greatest footage ever shot.
He was using that horribly misunderstood word,
"film style,"
and that takes such courage
and such wisdom
and such security.
He trusts the audience.
The oversaturation of
the color applies to all of the work.
There's an oversaturation in performance.
We're changed by great work.
So you see "Ran" because you're exposed to
something
that's as good
as a movie can get.
- Ideally, the audience can look at a film,
emotionally get the whole thing
and, uh, not necessarily be
able to explain it to somebody else.
You know what it means, but
you can't articulate it.
After I see a film,
I say, how do they do that?
I don't know how it gets done.
Kiss my hot lips!
Oh, hot...
- Lips?
Hot... Hot lips?
- We have got to share this with
the rest of this camp.
There's a word that's in
the director's manual,
it says "action."
I don't restrict the actors and I allow them to do
what they can do
or what they will
do, in fact, I insist on it
and I don't restrict their
performance.
Frank!
Wait a second!
- What is it?
- Turn the light on!
No, that's wrong... turn it off.
When we started film,
we took it from theater,
literature and we were an
extension of another art form.
It's still that way, it's getting away
from it and I think that eventually,
somebody will make
a film that is purely a film
and the audience can respond to as such
and I don't think it's been done.
- But I'm easy
Yeah I'm easy
Take my hand
and pull me down
I won't put up any fight
because I'm easy
Easy
Give the word I'll play your game
As though that's
how it ought to be
Because I'm easy
I've always said
that making a film
is like making a
sandcastle at the beach.
You invite your friends and you get 'em
down there and you say,
you build this beautiful
structure and have a drink,
watch the tide come in and
the ocean just takes it away,
and that sandcastle remains
in your mind.
- Can we talk about something
other than Hollywood for a change?
- Yes.
- Yes.
- We're educated people.
- Yeah.
- Sure.
- Sure.
- In this particular piece,
as in a lot of my work,
quite a bit of my work...
People are really
feeling a deep emotion, uh,
from the experience
that's going on on the screen,
and what's going on on the screen
right now is, uh,
an image of a
mother and her children
walking through, uh, some kind of barrier
and coming into our world,
and then, of course, which is
the fate of all of us, they have to go back.
They have to go back to
the dark gray side, uh,
and go back from where they came
and that's basically,
uh, our existence.
That's how
we live in this world.
Cinema is the preservation
of a memory.
Cinema is the inability
to remember without assistance.
Cinema is the preservation
of the moment
by slicing up
its parts into small pieces.
Cinema is an image that moves
too fast to be seen,
but just fast
enough to be believed.
Cinema is a series of frozen moments that might
wake up.
For me, art exists
on the fine line of knowing
and not knowing and a lot of
artists make a mistake,
myself included, that you're a
little too timid to sort of go all the way
uh, and for me, uh, my life has been changed by
the times
when something in
my mind, something in my head,
something in my heart just told me
to just take that other step.
The one that
you don't wanna take.
I don't connect the dots.
I like things that grow
sort of like the way plants grow
and they just take you and
intertwine and move,
sometimes inside you
and out of you and that,
to me, is howl make my work.
Very often sometimes, I don't
even know what I'm doing
and-and I guess I
kind of like it that way.
The natural world is
unpredictable.
We will never, ever find
a place where it's absolutely nice
and neat and tidy, it doesn't
work like that.
And that's, I think, is the
difference between artists and people
that don't make that leap
into the unknown.
I have to have an idea, you have
to have a way, you have to have a path.
That's all really important.
You have to have technique,
you have to do all of these things.
But in the end, it's gonna really
happen when you let go,
and let 90...
letting go, you fall,
and you didn't look to see if there
were rocks on the bottom
that you might crush
your head on, you just jump.
So much to do when video started and nobody
really knew it very well
so everybody was
trying to figure it out
and everybody was trying to, you know,
understand it better,
but in the end, really, what
you're really trying to understand
is yourself, your place
in the world.
What moves you honestly?
- Madam.
This is best.
Not, you know, what you saw
someone do or a cool movie you saw
but something really deep inside you that comes
from a very deep place.
The first motion pictures
were minute-long actualities.
And basically, the special effect, or
the attraction was the motion picture,
the moving picture, the idea
of a photograph that moved.
Mr. Ford, you made a picture
called "3 Bad Men,"
and you had a quite
elaborate land rush in it.
How did you shoot that?
With a camera.
- It's interesting to see them lined
up as museum pieces,
because... that's-
that's what they are.
- Everybody senses that there's
a big change going on.
Nobody knows what it
is and I certainly don't know.
I'm gonna be a part of the past.
It's going to become an
increasingly digitally produced medium.
It's neither good nor bad,
It just... It just is.
- Get away.
- What's changed, I think,
is the nature of the audience
and the parameters of
the movie industry.
It's much harder for a
certain kind of film to be made,
not just in Hollywood,
but anywhere.
I still think that very
talented and gifted individuals
are engrossed in the medium
and, you know,
the most interesting films
all come from the periphery.
- Everybody knows
a lot about film now,
whether they are aware
of it or not.
And so it's nice to be able
to deconstruct those things a little bit
or play with them
so you're not in a trance-like
state of, like,
I know what I'm... I
know what I came for and I will get that.
My films are more sunk in the mundane and the
day-to-day.
From the beginning, we know
we're gonna have limited resources,
so I'm always looking for stories,
that are mostly exteriors.
I like shooting on location.
And it's Oregon,
so we're usually in the rain.
I live a completely unadventurous life except for
when we're making a film.
You know, you're definitely
on an adventure with these people
that you're with.
It's like climbing a mountain.
Look around, you see trees
and rocks and bushes,
pressing around you and
then you get above the tree line,
you see everything you just went through and it
all, like,
comes together.
- Hey" What's going on?
Just relax, man.
"Old Joy" was a crew
of six, including the actors.
They had to be crew people, too.
I had paid for that film myself.
You know, I had
everybody for two weeks
and we just sort of went into
the woods to make this...
whatever it was gonna be.
The frailty of the production
really always does mirror
the frailty of what's happening.
With "Wendy and Lucy," if she
makes one mistake, she's done for.
She doesn't have a net,
we don't have a net.
- You can't sleep here, ma'am.
It's putting the audience
in the situation she's in.
There's a lot of themes
about society and tough times
and also, it's also
about aloneness.
To me, the ideal would be,
you know,
you leave the theater with
someone you saw the movie
with you and you both take
away a different idea
and it's not all so conclusive
that it's just
completely handed to you.
I'm here in my little
editing room.
Nobody says anything that I
have to do anything or follow anything.
I'm really grateful for it,
but it's what I tell myself when, um...
I want more time to shoot
and you know, more of everything.
- Independent film means films made with no
interference whatever,
with total creative freedom,
with absolute, um, integrity
uh, and no committees
of any kind
e-e-exerting any kind of
pressure on form or content.
I'm concerned with,
um, with the-the very substance,
the sort of tangible nuances of
how we are behaviorally.
People say, well,
what of the subject?
You know, there's a guy sitting here,
the sound recordist...
There's immediately a story there.
I want to know who he is, where
he's from, what he had for breakfast,
what his relationships
are about.
You know, there's a movie and there's
a guy sitting over there in the corner,
and there's another movie,
or it's the same movie,
I don't know.
- Johnny!
- Life is out there
to capture and explore and distill
and, uh, be that mirror
that we hold up.
- Where are you going, Johnny?
- You're off your head.
- I'm coming with you.
- No, you're not.
- I want to come with you!
- Don't you fucking
come with me.
- Are you coming back?
- What the fuck for?
- Don't stop!
- What about dinner?
- What?
- I can't eat
no more, I'm full up.
- It's not a joke!
- I'm gonna puke.
- Weak.
- The main subject with my films
is characters and their relationships.
The shoot has to be preceded by a substantial
chunk of time
through which you
discover what the piece of work is.
- In the rehearsal process
of "Secrets and Lies,
we had built the backstory,
as we do with all the characters,
of the central protagonist, Cynthia, played by
Brenda Blethyn.
- Hello?
- Is that Cynthia Purley?
- Yes.
- Of 76 Quota Street?
- Is... What is
it you want, darling?
- It's about Elizabeth.
- Elizabeth... Elizabeth who?
- Baby Elizabeth Purley.
The premise of how
I get all these things happening
is that nobody knows anything
about any of the other action
or characters except what
their character would know.
- She and I had decided that,
uh, when this girl, woman, was 16,
she was very, very vulnerable and
very, um, susceptible to guys
and was mistreated
and exploited by guys.
- I mean, I can't be your
mother, can I?
- Why not?
- Well, look at me.
- What?
- Listen, I don't
mean nothing by it, darling,
but I ain't never been with
a black man in my life.
No disrespect nor nothing.
I'd have remembered, wouldn't I?
We had decided
that she'd gone to a party,
she'd had too much to drink and
she'd gone with a black guy.
She had a fuck with
a black guy in the bathroom.
- Oh, bloody hell.
- We'd invented the fact that she'd had a baby
and she'd given that baby away.
- Oh, Jesus Christ almighty!
- She'd forgotten.
Brenda Blethyn, the actress,
had forgotten that moment.
So the shock that this woman was claiming to
be her daughter was,
she actually
experienced it for real.
- I'm sorry...
- I'm sorry.
I'm so ashamed.
- I had never saw a film
that wasn't in English 'til I was 17.
Suddenly, I discovered
world cinema.
Suddenly, in one
explosive moment, it was all going on.
You can't look at any of my work
and say it's obviously
influenced by "The Seventh Seal"...
But "The Seventh Seal" was a
revelation at that time.
- You keep on rowing,
I'll keep on smiling.
I see the world as being
deeply tragic and hilariously comic.
And I actually like watching
my films.
There are film directors who... who
can't bear to watch their own films.
Beats me how they expect
you to enjoy them.
My films are very much not only
about people, but there are about place.
Homes, of rooms, of things,
of clothes.
About... time passing.
At the last scene
of "Happy-Go-Lucky"
when the two protagonists are
in a rowing boat,
you analyze it, there's
something liberating about it
and philosophical, they are
being philosophical.
All kinds of magical things
happened and we did six takes
and the one take that we used has got the birds
flying through it.
And that is cinema.
You want to know what is cinema?
That is cinema.
Cinema is a matter of what's in
the frame and what's out.
Cinema is writing with images
and movement and with sounds.
Images and sounds,
like people who make
acquaintance on a train
and afterwards cannot separate.
An image is transformed by
contact with another image,
as a color is transformed
by contact with another color.
The camera is more
than a recorder.
It's a microscope.
It penetrates.
It goes into people.
The essence of cinema
is movement.
The most important
thing in movies is lighting.
The most important
thing in movies is casting.
We are in a time now
when movies, and more generally, art,
have been lost, do not exist, and
must somehow be reinvented.
Like lost children, we live our
unfinished adventures.
- You know, mainstream movies
are generally made in a certain way,
they're supposed to
tell a narrative.
We were very conscious
that we were doing, you know,
an unconventional approach in that way
where there was an
outline for a script
with some line,
just points to kind of hit.
- Press?
Press?
We'll knock on doors
and make those phone calls!
- Filmmakers can be a little bit
arrogant, so you need to,
sort of, check that at the door
and look outside the viewfinder
and be impacted by what you see.
- We have an idea in our head
and hopefully, you know,
not too far into it, that
idea changes, and if it doesn't,
maybe we're making
the wrong film.
- Okay, guys, we have
Michael Winterbottom... director.
Michael, how are you doing?
- It is a play, it is an experiment,
it's an instinctive thing,
rather than "this will mean this,"
I think, or "this will do this."
When you're making a film, it's not
like I don't care about the audience at all.
It's not like I want to deliberately
exclude an audience,
but I think as a filmmaker,
you can only make what you like,
you can only make the things
that you find interesting.
- Cinema is the multiple network
of... of technologies and ideas.
And it will continue as
long as humanity will continue.
- Good evening!
Good to see...
No...
It's like cooking.
It's not so much different.
You have icebox full of stuff and...
but you are making one dish,
so you don't just put everything,
you just put what belongs to it.
What advice
would you give to people?
- Never give any advice
to anybody.
This feels like your last film,
but I assume it isn't.
- No, it's up to you.
What managed to survive
the wars, dictators, fanatics, fires,
is because it's so rare that...
the reality recorded there.
Cinema is an artificial
perception looking for an experience.
Cinema is a series of frozen moments that might
wake up.
- It's rare...
- Special.
Unique.
We have this technology.
But what do you do with it?
You use it all,
it's part of the vocabulary
and to catch that truth of that moment, that's the
challenge.
What I like is not to arrive
at a clear and obvious conclusion,
but to leave you, the audience, stuff
to go away and argue about, um,
ponder about, reflect on,
rather than for it all to be tied up
so that you can go away and
forget the whole thing.
But sometimes,
you'll find that, um,
a film is looked at solely
for its content without any regard
to the style or manner in
which the story is told.
After all, that basically
is the art of the cinema.
Films, cinema,
cinema, it's contagious.
There is something in you
that-that-that needs it.
That need...
And you are driven to it.
You-you-you-you're pulled
into it.
My drug was movies.
Like reading poetry that makes
you want to... to-to also write poetry.
- Humanity, in-in order not to go... go nuts in
contemporary civilization,
which is very boring,
they need some entertainment,
They need something.
- It's... it's...
- They function the same as drugs.
We are almost at the point
where it's like a end of a circle
where people used to sit
and smoke and relax
and see images that
project into that smoke, and now,
after a series of many different technologies,
motion pictures,
video, computers, digital,
we are dreaming already about
implanting something in the eye,
in the brain.
It's like a big tree with small,
tiny branches and-and huge,
huge branches where...
and huge epics and-and little haiku.
The challenge, you see...
of my own challenge and every...
Everyone to watch in every art
is you just go,
like, to-to catch the essence.
You can call it hard, but usually
that's an essential moment
that you... that is... So much in it that
you want to go back again and again
to see or to listen or to experience,
to help you not to go crazy
or to go crazy in some other way.
It's so beautiful, cinema.
Cinema can go deep or it can go shallow
and I think the great films, uh,
tell a story, a surface story,
but the great cinema goes deep
into the psyche
and these undercurrents
are caught on deeper levels.
It can get abstract and conjure something in a
person
that can only be conjured
through this language of cinema.
The real gift is when you
get an idea,
it comes in a spark and you
see it and you feel it and you hear it.
If you get the elements correct, uh,
the thing will dig into a person
and they'll-they'll have this experience.
It can conjure a kind of a knowing,
even though it's abstract.
It's-It's real magical.
If the picture is giant
and the sound is beautiful
and the people are quiet and
they get into this world,
it's very, very delicate
how you get into that world,
it can be broken with
the wrong sound,
it can be broken
with a stupid little screen,
it can be broken with people
making noises in the theater.
It's so delicate, but if you get
into that world, it can be like a dream.
You're not only an observer, but you
can get caught up in that world
and it can become very real.
In dreams, logic goes out
the window and yet you understand it.
There's a thing
called imagination,
but I think imagination
is just ideas flowing.
I always equate it to fishing.
You can't take credit
for a beautiful little trout,
uh, but you can really appreciate it
when you catch one.
- I'm so glad you didn't give the center over to
the aisle, this is really good.
Good.
I just remember,
you know, a lot of people saying...
I've never seen kind of... these
kinds of films ever, just...
And I see yours and
I'm kind of, "Whoa, what is this?"
- Good.
These movies are,
you know, thoughts.
They're stores of memory.
And they only matter to us because
they strike sparks with that stuff.
- I'm very, very inspired.
- You don't have much
of a choice.
You have to... You have to do it.
You know, we have to...
persevere.
So what'd you
think of the audience?
Did they like the movie...
They got it?
- Yeah.
No one walked out that I know.
You just have to really
be afflicted with it, really.
- I'm interested
in alternative film form.
I'm really interested in what
the medium itself can do.
What I'm looking
for in film is to get...
an enhanced understanding, an enhanced
access to the world.
- It's diminishing, the amount of interest there is
in this kind of cinema, I think,
but there's still
a hardcore group of people
that still appreciate it.
- And there's young people
who are coming up
who are really interested in it.
- I'm not gonna, like,
blanket-say Meryl Streep can't fit into it.
- That dingo took my baby!
Took my baby... My baby!
- Bun apptit.
- If I juxtaposition
or remake it in a certain way,
maybe it could fit in
this category.
- All al... alone.
All al... alone.
All al...
We distribute films that
are not for the mass media.
Hollywood has a formulaic,
a beginning, a middle
and an end.
If I go see
the "Twilight" series, it-it...
The vampires isn't even
a vampire.
He won't sleep with the girl
because, uh, he's Mormon or something.
I look for the deepest part of
the human psyche,
what cannot be expressed in words
and what is, um, sometimes
graphic and explicit and painful,
but it's what we all have in common, what makes
us human.
- I think we're seeing
an experimental film
from maybe the '60s,
but I can't really place it.
I see a lot of, sort of, Andy Warhol
factory-types.
I tend to sort of prefer my
cinema to have a little bit of story.
I feel like that's important.
I have, uh, an iPhone and I can just sit
there and record and record
and, um, that
doesn't make it cinematic.
It just makes it a $300 item
that records video.
You have to bring a
little bit more to the show
if you want to
be called cinema, I feel.
All al...
We're part of the counterculture,
that idea of outside the mainstreams
and it still applies today.
It can be any form,
it can be any content.
It's personal vision.
Anyone can make a film.
- To me, the-the basis of, uh,
motion pictures is the experience
and the narrative can be
part of the-the-the, uh...
the experience, but it's-it's that you-you
as the viewer experience something
in-in time.
A great movie, um, stand
up under repeated viewings
And that once you know the story,
you're free in a way to get deeper
into other parts of the-of the experience.
There's a lot more than, uh,
than-than-than just the plot.
- You don't go to bed deciding what you're gonna
dream and make, uh, notes,
I will dream this.
You know, you don't
need a script, you dream.
And the dreams can be very vivid,
and you know, utterly necessary.
And I felt that way about-about
the filmmaking,
that if I-if I had a story to tell,
it-it would make itself known.
And the powerful thing about
motion pictures
is that it's an experience which hundreds of
thousands, millions of people
can-can share, although it's not
going to be identical in every case,
and that-that, to me, is
not the same thing
as-as saying that they're
all, um, following the same story.
There's nothing intrinsic
in motion pictures
that demands a
narrative and a case could be made
that the narrative element
is, uh, secondary
to many other
things in the movie.
- The best scripts don't
make the best films,
you know, because
they have that kind of literary,
you know, narrative thing, you know, that you're
sort of a slave to.
The best films, you know,
are the ones that aren't, like,
tied to that slavishly, so, um...
so I don't know, the whole narrative thing, it just
seems to me like, you know,
you don't-you don't first think
of the story of the song
and then make the song,
you know, it has to come out
of the... that moment,
you know, and that's what film has,
it's just that moment which is holy.
- I was in and out of the
holy moment, looking at you.
Can't be in a holy...
you're unique that way, Caveh.
That's one of the reasons
I enjoy you.
You can bring me into that.
Let's see, now, I have a
sample of her handwriting here.
Oh, yes.
Here we are.
Has an interesting address.
When I say that I'm
not interested in content, uh,
it's, uh, it would be the same as
a painter worrying about
whether the apples that he's
painting, whether they're sweet or sour.
Who cares?
It's his style, his
manner of painting them.
We have a rectangular screen
in a movie house.
Now, this rectangular screen has got
to be filled with a succession of images.
Any art form is there for
the artist to interpret it
in his own way and
thus create an emotion.
I wish I knew how to quit you.
- You just don't
belong in my world, Bella.
- I belong with you.
- My name is Maximus Decimus
Meridius.
And I will have my vengeance.
- Can't you see it's impossible?
- No.
- In dealing with
high emotion of jealousy
and, uh all of the melodramatic
elements, betrayals and all
this kind of stuff, I was
very aware of-of dealing with a genre,
but, uh, because I didn't use actors,
I used, uh, dancers who had no
acting ability at all.
One way of describing my
relation to making art of any kind
is, uh, batting my head against
the wall of, uh, familiar practices.
- I'd like to kick your ass in.
- It's a Brechtian idea
of disrupting the spectators'
identification, uh,
and making them aware that they're seeing
something that is constructed.
Sherman, is that you?
Shut up back there.
Now, you keep your body there.
One, two.
I was making a kind of dance
that wasn't involved with stories
or topical issues and
the second wave of feminism came along
and the possibilities of film
seemed so much more...
open and, uh, extended than
what I was able to do with-with dance.
- Court jesters were
always male.
Even as fools,
they were accorded dignity.
But when a woman plays the fool,
she's made to feel like an idiot.
There's no dignity
in the role for us.
I never expected
a mass audience.
I mean, I go to some of my
screenings and the only reason I stay
is to see when people
will leave.
"Jeanne Dielman" was a
very radical film for its time.
She was telling a story, in a
very attenuated way,
about the disillusion
of the main character.
- Of course, we were all influenced
by feminism and its, uh, its protest
against the, uh, inequities
in social and private life.
There is no way the image of a
woman could, uh, be, uh, represented
without it being sexualized.
This male gaze was
something to be analyzed...
Beginning with the director then
the, uh, the male character.
The woman's body was a landscape
through which the man passed
and controlled.
- Here's looking at you, kid.
- This is one night you're
not turning me out.
- This your girl?
- I'm my mother's girl.
You know, it still goes on.
We are bombarded
by images of women's bodies
and it's an ongoing struggle
to deal with that
in art-making of all kinds.
- Wh-what's this?
Heavy underwear.
Sorry about that.
- Cinema is
the sexiest thing possible.
First of all, you're dealing with
the issue of control and passivity.
The person behind the camera
ostensibly has control,
the person in front of the camera
is supposedly the subjective,
or the object,
and so there's a little dance.
But I absolutely believe that
everything in life is political.
For me, anything that you
turn the camera onto
is, in essence, a documentation.
Brother to brother,
brother to brother.
Brother to brother,
brother to brother.
Brother to brother,
brother to brother.
Brother to brother,
brother to brother.
Brother to brother,
brother to brother.
Brother to brother,
brother to brother.
Something very
powerful about sitting in a dark theater
with a few hundred people, mostly
strangers, and the audience,
though they are not really communicating with
each other,
they do affect each other and-and
it becomes sort of a collective force.
I asked Corporal Henderson
of the United States Marine Corps
to join me on Capitol Hill
to see how many members
of Congress we could convince
to enlist their children
to go to Iraq.
Congressman?
Michael Moore...
How are you doing?
- How are you today?
- Good, good.
I'm trying to get
members of Congress
to get their kids to enlist in the army
and go over to Iraq.
Congressman?
Congressman... Congressman?
Congressman Doolittle.
- Oh, no...
- I'm wondering if...
- I believe movies, especially documentaries
should have a point of view
and the filmmaker should be honest
about their point of view.
Should believe in something.
If I was making a movie about
women getting the right to vote,
you know, well, Mike,
you didn't...
You didn't put in those people that thought
women shouldn't be voting.
Yeah, that's right.
Paco.
Raymond.
T-Tania...
Todd.
I consider my documentaries
to be dramatic films.
What's the theme of the film?
What's the heartbeat
of the film?
You know, we forget that
someday, this is gonna be over.
Someday, there's gonna be
no such thing as AIDS.
Our most precious jewel.
- John.
- Our most beautiful son.
John Anthony.
- Johnny boy.
- Johnny boy.
- If it works as a story,
if it engages the viewer, um,
if it makes sense to the viewer, if it moves the
viewer, informs, uh,
I want it to work
for anybody who sees it.
And we love him so much.
We love him so much.
I didn't drop napalm,
but I dropped other things just as bad.
And people would suffer.
They would-they would live, but they
would suffer, you know,
then often they would die afterwards.
And this would cause people to
have to take care of them, you know?
But I look at my children now
and, uh, I don't know what
would happen if...
what I would think
about if someone napalmed...
Some of the great films that were
documentaries that I saw
were very inspiring because I saw
things that I couldn't see anyplace else.
Come on now!
Everybody, just cool out!
- You okay, Jim?
- Yes, Johnny!
- Huh?
What are you doing, Jim?
What do you do
for a living, Jason?
- I hustle.
I'm a stone whore.
And I'm not ashamed of it.
Of course, we are challenging
nature itself.
And it hits back.
It just hits back, that's all.
And I wouldn't see anything
"erotical" here,
I would see fornication
and asphyxiation and choking
and fighting for survival
and growing and...
Just rotting away.
You don't remember?
- This isn't a deposition, sir.
I was polite enough to
give you time.
Foolishly, I now see.
You have three more minutes.
Give it your best shot.
I don't have a lot of, uh, highfalutin
hopes for movies
or anything, really,
changing the world these days,
although I-I do remain
an optimist.
Excuse me.
Excuse me.
Uh, where are you guys going?
- We're going
up to the 14th floor.
- Do you have an appointment?
- No, we're gonna try and
see Roger Smith.
- No, you're not.
You're not gonna get
on one of those elevators.
- Why is that?
- If you don't have an appointment, you're not
going up to 14.
- Well, can we go up and
try and make an appointment?
- No.
.Why?
- I need Tony or Denise.
- And the reason to talk
to Roger Smith would be?
- Uh, Michael Moore.
- No, what's your reason for
seeing Roger Smith?
- Excuse me, I need to see you.
- Um, we're doing...
We're making a film.
Cinema is a way to sort of...
to take a look at the world
in which we live and make
it writ large so that the audience
watching the film
becomes part of it.
And they do become part of it.
- People used to talk
to me about "Z" so much,
almost 45 years ago.
The fact that the few
movies succeed, survive,
I think the only explanation I have
is that the director and
the actors and everybody
give so much passion to
make that movie
and its passion remains, survives.
Everyone finally has a vision of
the movie, has a vision of the scene,
so the important thing is to bring everybody to
go to the director's vision.
We don't do in a kind of political
speech or university speech.
I would like the audience
to feel it much more than see it.
I believe the story's most important,
with a good style, of course.
- Photography does
not create eternity as art does.
It embalms time, rescuing it simply
from its proper corruption.
Viewed in this perspective,
the cinema is objectivity and time.
For the French film critic Andr Bazin, the
invention of photography
and cinema were revolutionary because
for the first time in human history,
we could record and therefore capture and hold
an actual moment in time.
For him, this was
revolutionary, not least because,
even though a director chooses
what to film,
can put the film images in any
order and then alter them in any way,
nonetheless, there is that direct contact with an
original moment in time.
And for Bazin, what we see
on screen only exists in relation
to everything that's
not on screen.
Cinema suggests
as much as it reveals.
- So, finally you watch
the movie.
There is nothing...
you create the universe.
The movie is not reality.
It's based on the real,
but it's not reality.
The art's... much
too longer, much too complex.
The important thing is to give the audience the
elements
they can understand the story
and what the story is meaning.
So, the way you do it
I don't really know.
I don't know.
He is totally trusting
himself and the material.
He winds up with some of
the greatest footage ever shot.
He was using that horribly misunderstood word,
"film style,"
and that takes such courage
and such wisdom
and such security.
He trusts the audience.
The oversaturation of
the color applies to all of the work.
There's an oversaturation in performance.
We're changed by great work.
So you see "Ran" because you're exposed to
something
that's as good
as a movie can get.
- Ideally, the audience can look at a film,
emotionally get the whole thing
and, uh, not necessarily be
able to explain it to somebody else.
You know what it means, but
you can't articulate it.
After I see a film,
I say, how do they do that?
I don't know how it gets done.
Kiss my hot lips!
Oh, hot...
- Lips?
Hot... Hot lips?
- We have got to share this with
the rest of this camp.
There's a word that's in
the director's manual,
it says "action."
I don't restrict the actors and I allow them to do
what they can do
or what they will
do, in fact, I insist on it
and I don't restrict their
performance.
Frank!
Wait a second!
- What is it?
- Turn the light on!
No, that's wrong... turn it off.
When we started film,
we took it from theater,
literature and we were an
extension of another art form.
It's still that way, it's getting away
from it and I think that eventually,
somebody will make
a film that is purely a film
and the audience can respond to as such
and I don't think it's been done.
- But I'm easy
Yeah I'm easy
Take my hand
and pull me down
I won't put up any fight
because I'm easy
Easy
Give the word I'll play your game
As though that's
how it ought to be
Because I'm easy
I've always said
that making a film
is like making a
sandcastle at the beach.
You invite your friends and you get 'em
down there and you say,
you build this beautiful
structure and have a drink,
watch the tide come in and
the ocean just takes it away,
and that sandcastle remains
in your mind.
- Can we talk about something
other than Hollywood for a change?
- Yes.
- Yes.
- We're educated people.
- Yeah.
- Sure.
- Sure.
- In this particular piece,
as in a lot of my work,
quite a bit of my work...
People are really
feeling a deep emotion, uh,
from the experience
that's going on on the screen,
and what's going on on the screen
right now is, uh,
an image of a
mother and her children
walking through, uh, some kind of barrier
and coming into our world,
and then, of course, which is
the fate of all of us, they have to go back.
They have to go back to
the dark gray side, uh,
and go back from where they came
and that's basically,
uh, our existence.
That's how
we live in this world.
Cinema is the preservation
of a memory.
Cinema is the inability
to remember without assistance.
Cinema is the preservation
of the moment
by slicing up
its parts into small pieces.
Cinema is an image that moves
too fast to be seen,
but just fast
enough to be believed.
Cinema is a series of frozen moments that might
wake up.
For me, art exists
on the fine line of knowing
and not knowing and a lot of
artists make a mistake,
myself included, that you're a
little too timid to sort of go all the way
uh, and for me, uh, my life has been changed by
the times
when something in
my mind, something in my head,
something in my heart just told me
to just take that other step.
The one that
you don't wanna take.
I don't connect the dots.
I like things that grow
sort of like the way plants grow
and they just take you and
intertwine and move,
sometimes inside you
and out of you and that,
to me, is howl make my work.
Very often sometimes, I don't
even know what I'm doing
and-and I guess I
kind of like it that way.
The natural world is
unpredictable.
We will never, ever find
a place where it's absolutely nice
and neat and tidy, it doesn't
work like that.
And that's, I think, is the
difference between artists and people
that don't make that leap
into the unknown.
I have to have an idea, you have
to have a way, you have to have a path.
That's all really important.
You have to have technique,
you have to do all of these things.
But in the end, it's gonna really
happen when you let go,
and let 90...
letting go, you fall,
and you didn't look to see if there
were rocks on the bottom
that you might crush
your head on, you just jump.
So much to do when video started and nobody
really knew it very well
so everybody was
trying to figure it out
and everybody was trying to, you know,
understand it better,
but in the end, really, what
you're really trying to understand
is yourself, your place
in the world.
What moves you honestly?
- Madam.
This is best.
Not, you know, what you saw
someone do or a cool movie you saw
but something really deep inside you that comes
from a very deep place.
The first motion pictures
were minute-long actualities.
And basically, the special effect, or
the attraction was the motion picture,
the moving picture, the idea
of a photograph that moved.
Mr. Ford, you made a picture
called "3 Bad Men,"
and you had a quite
elaborate land rush in it.
How did you shoot that?
With a camera.
- It's interesting to see them lined
up as museum pieces,
because... that's-
that's what they are.
- Everybody senses that there's
a big change going on.
Nobody knows what it
is and I certainly don't know.
I'm gonna be a part of the past.
It's going to become an
increasingly digitally produced medium.
It's neither good nor bad,
It just... It just is.
- Get away.
- What's changed, I think,
is the nature of the audience
and the parameters of
the movie industry.
It's much harder for a
certain kind of film to be made,
not just in Hollywood,
but anywhere.
I still think that very
talented and gifted individuals
are engrossed in the medium
and, you know,
the most interesting films
all come from the periphery.
- Everybody knows
a lot about film now,
whether they are aware
of it or not.
And so it's nice to be able
to deconstruct those things a little bit
or play with them
so you're not in a trance-like
state of, like,
I know what I'm... I
know what I came for and I will get that.
My films are more sunk in the mundane and the
day-to-day.
From the beginning, we know
we're gonna have limited resources,
so I'm always looking for stories,
that are mostly exteriors.
I like shooting on location.
And it's Oregon,
so we're usually in the rain.
I live a completely unadventurous life except for
when we're making a film.
You know, you're definitely
on an adventure with these people
that you're with.
It's like climbing a mountain.
Look around, you see trees
and rocks and bushes,
pressing around you and
then you get above the tree line,
you see everything you just went through and it
all, like,
comes together.
- Hey" What's going on?
Just relax, man.
"Old Joy" was a crew
of six, including the actors.
They had to be crew people, too.
I had paid for that film myself.
You know, I had
everybody for two weeks
and we just sort of went into
the woods to make this...
whatever it was gonna be.
The frailty of the production
really always does mirror
the frailty of what's happening.
With "Wendy and Lucy," if she
makes one mistake, she's done for.
She doesn't have a net,
we don't have a net.
- You can't sleep here, ma'am.
It's putting the audience
in the situation she's in.
There's a lot of themes
about society and tough times
and also, it's also
about aloneness.
To me, the ideal would be,
you know,
you leave the theater with
someone you saw the movie
with you and you both take
away a different idea
and it's not all so conclusive
that it's just
completely handed to you.
I'm here in my little
editing room.
Nobody says anything that I
have to do anything or follow anything.
I'm really grateful for it,
but it's what I tell myself when, um...
I want more time to shoot
and you know, more of everything.
- Independent film means films made with no
interference whatever,
with total creative freedom,
with absolute, um, integrity
uh, and no committees
of any kind
e-e-exerting any kind of
pressure on form or content.
I'm concerned with,
um, with the-the very substance,
the sort of tangible nuances of
how we are behaviorally.
People say, well,
what of the subject?
You know, there's a guy sitting here,
the sound recordist...
There's immediately a story there.
I want to know who he is, where
he's from, what he had for breakfast,
what his relationships
are about.
You know, there's a movie and there's
a guy sitting over there in the corner,
and there's another movie,
or it's the same movie,
I don't know.
- Johnny!
- Life is out there
to capture and explore and distill
and, uh, be that mirror
that we hold up.
- Where are you going, Johnny?
- You're off your head.
- I'm coming with you.
- No, you're not.
- I want to come with you!
- Don't you fucking
come with me.
- Are you coming back?
- What the fuck for?
- Don't stop!
- What about dinner?
- What?
- I can't eat
no more, I'm full up.
- It's not a joke!
- I'm gonna puke.
- Weak.
- The main subject with my films
is characters and their relationships.
The shoot has to be preceded by a substantial
chunk of time
through which you
discover what the piece of work is.
- In the rehearsal process
of "Secrets and Lies,
we had built the backstory,
as we do with all the characters,
of the central protagonist, Cynthia, played by
Brenda Blethyn.
- Hello?
- Is that Cynthia Purley?
- Yes.
- Of 76 Quota Street?
- Is... What is
it you want, darling?
- It's about Elizabeth.
- Elizabeth... Elizabeth who?
- Baby Elizabeth Purley.
The premise of how
I get all these things happening
is that nobody knows anything
about any of the other action
or characters except what
their character would know.
- She and I had decided that,
uh, when this girl, woman, was 16,
she was very, very vulnerable and
very, um, susceptible to guys
and was mistreated
and exploited by guys.
- I mean, I can't be your
mother, can I?
- Why not?
- Well, look at me.
- What?
- Listen, I don't
mean nothing by it, darling,
but I ain't never been with
a black man in my life.
No disrespect nor nothing.
I'd have remembered, wouldn't I?
We had decided
that she'd gone to a party,
she'd had too much to drink and
she'd gone with a black guy.
She had a fuck with
a black guy in the bathroom.
- Oh, bloody hell.
- We'd invented the fact that she'd had a baby
and she'd given that baby away.
- Oh, Jesus Christ almighty!
- She'd forgotten.
Brenda Blethyn, the actress,
had forgotten that moment.
So the shock that this woman was claiming to
be her daughter was,
she actually
experienced it for real.
- I'm sorry...
- I'm sorry.
I'm so ashamed.
- I had never saw a film
that wasn't in English 'til I was 17.
Suddenly, I discovered
world cinema.
Suddenly, in one
explosive moment, it was all going on.
You can't look at any of my work
and say it's obviously
influenced by "The Seventh Seal"...
But "The Seventh Seal" was a
revelation at that time.
- You keep on rowing,
I'll keep on smiling.
I see the world as being
deeply tragic and hilariously comic.
And I actually like watching
my films.
There are film directors who... who
can't bear to watch their own films.
Beats me how they expect
you to enjoy them.
My films are very much not only
about people, but there are about place.
Homes, of rooms, of things,
of clothes.
About... time passing.
At the last scene
of "Happy-Go-Lucky"
when the two protagonists are
in a rowing boat,
you analyze it, there's
something liberating about it
and philosophical, they are
being philosophical.
All kinds of magical things
happened and we did six takes
and the one take that we used has got the birds
flying through it.
And that is cinema.
You want to know what is cinema?
That is cinema.
Cinema is a matter of what's in
the frame and what's out.
Cinema is writing with images
and movement and with sounds.
Images and sounds,
like people who make
acquaintance on a train
and afterwards cannot separate.
An image is transformed by
contact with another image,
as a color is transformed
by contact with another color.
The camera is more
than a recorder.
It's a microscope.
It penetrates.
It goes into people.
The essence of cinema
is movement.
The most important
thing in movies is lighting.
The most important
thing in movies is casting.
We are in a time now
when movies, and more generally, art,
have been lost, do not exist, and
must somehow be reinvented.
Like lost children, we live our
unfinished adventures.
- You know, mainstream movies
are generally made in a certain way,
they're supposed to
tell a narrative.
We were very conscious
that we were doing, you know,
an unconventional approach in that way
where there was an
outline for a script
with some line,
just points to kind of hit.
- Press?
Press?
We'll knock on doors
and make those phone calls!
- Filmmakers can be a little bit
arrogant, so you need to,
sort of, check that at the door
and look outside the viewfinder
and be impacted by what you see.
- We have an idea in our head
and hopefully, you know,
not too far into it, that
idea changes, and if it doesn't,
maybe we're making
the wrong film.
- Okay, guys, we have
Michael Winterbottom... director.
Michael, how are you doing?
- It is a play, it is an experiment,
it's an instinctive thing,
rather than "this will mean this,"
I think, or "this will do this."
When you're making a film, it's not
like I don't care about the audience at all.
It's not like I want to deliberately
exclude an audience,
but I think as a filmmaker,
you can only make what you like,
you can only make the things
that you find interesting.
- Cinema is the multiple network
of... of technologies and ideas.
And it will continue as
long as humanity will continue.
- Good evening!
Good to see...
No...
It's like cooking.
It's not so much different.
You have icebox full of stuff and...
but you are making one dish,
so you don't just put everything,
you just put what belongs to it.
What advice
would you give to people?
- Never give any advice
to anybody.
This feels like your last film,
but I assume it isn't.
- No, it's up to you.
What managed to survive
the wars, dictators, fanatics, fires,
is because it's so rare that...
the reality recorded there.
Cinema is an artificial
perception looking for an experience.
Cinema is a series of frozen moments that might
wake up.
- It's rare...
- Special.
Unique.