My First Movie, Take Two Ten Celebrated Directors TAlk About Their First Film

by LOWENSTEIN, STEPHEN

• ISBN13: 9781400079902
• ISBN10: 140007990X
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-01-06
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

A sequel to the critically acclaimedMy First Movie, Stephen Lowenstein once again talks to some of our most celebrated filmmakers about their debut films. Lowenstein interviews ten directors about their career-launching film and how they got the movie off the ground: how they raised the finance, found actors, searched for locations, worked with the crew and saw the project through to completion. Filmmakers interviewed include Richard Linklater onSlacker; Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu onAmores Perros; Terry Gilliam onJabberwocky; and Sam Mendes onAmerican Beauty. A wonderfully rich compendium that is lively, informative, funny, and often surprising.

Author Biography

Stephen Lowenstein is the author of My First Movie. He has worked on British television documentaries for Channel 4, ITV, and the BBC. He is the writer/director of two critically acclaimed short films and currently has several feature-length projects in development in England and America. He lives in London.

Excerpts

chapter 1 Richard Linklater SLACKER Can you say a little about your upbringing? I was born in Houston and lived there my first ten years. My parents divorced when I was seven, and eventually my mother got a teaching job in Huntsville, Texas, which is about seventy miles northeast of Houston. So I moved there when I'd just turned ten. And that was quite different from Houston. When you live in a big city there's a lot going on, art museums, the zoo, pro sports teams, and so on. And then we moved to this pretty small town, eighteen thousand people, and there was a university and the state prison there. We were always moving around. Even in that town we moved every year. My mom was struggling, I guess. So I think I had a semirural Texas upbringing because this was a small town with a lot of ranchers and a church on every corner, a really small, conservative town. But on the weekends I'd go and visit my father in Houston and go to movies and art museums. So I had this small town/big town upbringing. I'm thankful for this because I would see a movie in Houston and I would go back and tell my friends about it in Huntsville. And then it would show up in Huntsville six weeks later. So I was always ahead of the curve, culturally speaking. On the other hand, I only left Texas once before I was twenty! Were movies already something you were interested in as a kid? No, no. Movies were very far away. They were just magical things you went and saw. I liked every movie I saw up to a certain age. I just liked movies. I still do. But the thought that you could make a movie I can't explain how far that was from my thinking. The idea that I could ever make a movie never entered my mind until college. Now kids are very aware of the process. But then, movies just showed up. Oh, here's the cowboy movie! Every week it was a new movie. They were just social things we'd go to. But I was a writer from an early age. I was the fifth-grader writing the story that the teacher would read aloud to the class. In sixth grade we did a production of Julius Caesar and I ended up a kind of co-director to the teacher. I naturally took a lead role. So I think I had a feel for it. I wrote a play in junior high that got performed for the faculty. Looking back, some of it makes sense, but I didn't really think about it much at the time. I was probably most interested in sports. It wasn't until college that I started to take a couple of theater classes and started to think about film. That's a huge jump, though. I just went from junior high to college. Can you say a little about your high school years? I had a pretty mediocre education, although I had an influential English teacher in my third year of high school. I was in this advanced classwhich I wasn't really qualified to be in, as I didn't have particularly good gradesbut the teacher before had recommended me because I'd written something she liked. We wrote a lot, and our teacher actually showed us Battleship Potemkin and we had to analyze it. So I started thinking about film a little bit. In my senior year I remember four of us wandered into a midnight screening of Eraserhead. The three people I was with were ready to go about twenty minutes in. They were like, "What the fuck is this?" I was like, "I'm not going anywhere." Maybe I couldn't explain what I was watching, but I couldn't take my eyes off it. But in general I didn't have many serious thoughts in my head at that time. I was just being a kid. I'm amazed at how shallow I was at that age. I read now what other people were doing at certain ages and I'm really envious at how advanced they were and what great educations they received.