The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011): Season 1, Episode 14 - Episode #1.14 - full transcript
MARK COUSINS:
At the end of the 1800s,
a new art form flickered into life.
It looked like our dreams.
Movies are a multimillion-dollar
global entertainment industry now,
but what drives them
isn't box office or showbiz.
It's passion, innovation.
So let's travel the world to find
this innovation for ourselves.
We'll discover it in this man,
Stanley Donen,
who made 'Singin' in the Rain'.
And in Jane Campion in Australia.
And in the films of Kyoko Kagawa,
who was in perhaps
the greatest movie ever made.
And in Amitabh Bachchan,
the most famous actor in the world.
And in the movies of Martin Scorsese
and Spike Lee,
Lars von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.
Welcome to The Story of Film:
An Odyssey,
an epic tale of innovation
across 12 decades,
six continents and 1,000 films.
In this chapter,
we explore the movies
of the Coen brothers
and Quentin Tarantino,
and discover
Baz Luhrmann's 'Romeo + Juliet'.
Almost every film made during the
first 100 years of The Story of Film
was made like this.
To get a shot to move through space,
you put the camera
on something that moved.
To film a deer,
as we do here, fleetingly,
you had to find a real deer
and photograph it,
unless, of course, you drew
an animated deer like Bambi.
But then came
the first days of digital.
Look at this shot.
Smoke coming out of buildings.
Sunlight from top right.
It looks like the camera
was on a helicopter.
All attempts to make the shot
look like a real city, photographed,
but it isn't.
These tiny horses kicking up dust
look like the deer in
the previous shot, but they're not.
A place like this
is where this shot was made.
Almost everything in the shot was
drawn on a computer like this one.
DW Griffith had put a camera
on a giant crane
to create this gliding shot
of an ancient city.
Here, in the first days of digital,
director Ridley Scott wanted
to create a gliding, epic shot
of an ancient city
with tiny people like ants, too.
Computers became central
to cinema in the 1990s.
Instead of film imagery
being made up of tiny grains
of silver halide on celluloid,
it became tiny rows of digital
information - ones and zeros.
In 1921, a boy electrician
called Philo Farnsworth
was ploughing a field.
He looked at the rows of earth
and realised that imagery
could be made
of tiny rows
of picture information too,
scanned at incredible speeds.
Jump 70 years and you get this.
A liquid metal representation
of a person
turns into a photographed actor.
Director James Cameron
had his design and technical teams
scan the photographed image
into the computer.
Then they drew shiny surfaces,
movements and reflections
to make it look like the man
had become mercury.
The technique became known
as computer-generated imagery, CGI.
Live action and animation
had been combined before,
as far back as Gene Kelly
dancing with Jerry Mouse
in 'Anchors Aweigh'.
But this was crucially different -
Jerry looked 2-dimensional,
the light on him doesn't change.
He looked like he'd been drawn...
Shit!
..but the liquid metal man
looked like he'd been photographed.
The metal seemed
to have real substance,
as if it was actually
in the helicopter here,
reflecting the light in the shot
and the head of the pilot.
Get out.
Arggh!
The implications were astonishing.
It was if cinema
had been rewound and started again
from the olden days.
The first animators
tried to show a dinosaur.
The wobbly lines show that it
was drawn with real human hands.
Now, Steven Spielberg could do so
with such hyperrealism
that we could almost smell
a dinosaur's breath,
apprehend the texture
of the dinosaur's skin,
the shadows cast by the small one...
..the reflections on the floor
of the feet of the T. rex.
This is the only surviving footage
of the ocean liner the 'Titanic'.
A flickering pan right that
shows its massiveness, its hope.
As we watch, we imagine
the grand tragedy that befell it.
80 years later, James Cameron shows
us what we've long wanted to see,
as if it had actually
been photographed...
..the sinking liner
by the light of the silvery moon.
Shots filmed in deep space
to show the height of the boat
and the length of the jump.
Arggh!
'70s cinema had been
about what we wanted to see -
'Jaws', 'The Exorcist', 'Star Wars'.
'90s cinema had become 'can see'.
This was exciting.
Movies had become spectacle again,
about the thrill of seeing,
as if for the first time.
But once the thrill had passed,
old questions remained.
The first is about admiration
or ethics.
Real human courage and imagination
goes into a shot like this.
The camera and the guy
are really strapped to the plane
as it does a scary loop the loop.
Hard work and long hours spent
in relative comfort, eating pizza,
go into a shot like this.
Despite its bravura, has reality
lost some of its realness?
The second old question
is a human question.
It's the theme of The Story of Film.
Innovation.
All techniques, including CGI,
should be used inventively.
MAN: Buzz! Buzz!
The first mainstream feature film
to be made entirely with a computer
was this inventive one.
Director John Lassiter and his team
use the new possibilities of CGI
to render shadows,
do dynamic deep staging,
and see from positions
that would be difficult
for a real camera to shoot from.
Safer in the cockpit
than a cargo bay. What an idiot!
Whaaa! Oof!
(CRIES OUT)
This was the pricey end of CGI
but, as always, innovation
doesn't need to be expensive.
CAMERAMAN: You alright?
This film was not only shot
mostly on low-tech digital video
but marketed on the internet.
No, I don't need any help. I'm OK.
What happened?
Nothing. Nothing happened.
I'm just very hungry
and I'm very tired.
And I'm very scared
and I just want to go home, OK?
OK.
But I'm fine, and we're both OK.
It had the look and sound
of camcorder video footage.
His voice is close to the camera,
recorded by its internal mike.
The whites in her face burn out -
a very video effect.
In the same year,
digital cinemas opened up
in America, Korea,
Spain, Germany and Mexico...
..and in 2001-2002 George Lucas
shot 'Star Wars: Episode II'
entirely without using celluloid.
And, as has often been the case
in The Story of Film,
Asian filmmakers
were even more innovative.
Here's Zhang Yimou's
'House of Flying Daggers'.
A blind dancer.
(CHUCKLES)
(GIGGLES)
To challenge her,
a man flicks a bean against drums
to create sounds around her.
The camera rushes forward
with the bean, then swishes left.
The bean's computer generated.
Motion blur,
again computer generated.
(INTENSE DRUMMING)
Then her sleeve garment
picks up a CGI sword.
Then the man throws
a CGI plate at her.
She's seeing and not seeing,
but so are we -
images doing things
they could never do before,
all with the brilliant
Chinese choreography and grace.
Remarkable innovation.
The theme of The Story of Film.
But if what ran through the camera
in the '90s -
digital tape rather
than celluloid - changed,
what ran in front of the camera
seemed to change too.
Reality seemed to lose
some of its realness.
Life was no longer just modern,
it became postmodern - playful.
In the '90s, American films
like 'Schindler's List',
'LA Confidential'
and 'The Silence of the Lambs'
were serious '40s genre pictures...
..in new guises.
But the real flavours of the times
were irony and postmodernism -
the idea that there are
no great truths,
that everything is recycled.
More than previously,
filmmakers started playing games
with old genres,
quoting from previous films,
making films about films.
Even the master
of New American Cinema of the '70s,
Martin Scorsese, started doing this.
Look at the ending
of Scorsese's film 'Goodfellas'.
Like several of his movies,
it's about gangsters.
But what's different
is that this gangster
looks right into the camera,
a very postmodern thing to do.
MAN: (NARRATES)
I'm an average nobody.
I get to live the rest of my life
like a schnook.
And then, out of nowhere, Joe Pesci
shoots right down the lens -
a surprising shot until we remember
that one of the oldest films
ever made,
'The Great Train Robbery',
did the same thing.
Scorsese knew this shot
and repeated it.
Film quoting film,
a very '90s thing to do.
American movies of the '90s were
full of playful twists on old films.
In this classic film noir
from the '40s, for example,
two killers are about to do a hit.
The lighting's dark, the shadows
are from German expressionism
and, typically, the killers
don't say much.
There's little dialogue.
Compare that to this scene
of two killers about to do a hit
in one of the most influential
gangster pictures of the '90s,
'Pulp Fiction'.
The lighting's much brighter
but what's more noticeable
is that in 'Pulp Fiction'
they talk...a lot.
I ain't saying it's right.
But you're saying a foot massage
don't mean nothing.
I'm saying it does.
Now, look, I've given a million
ladies a million foot massages
and they all meant something.
We act like they don't,
but they do.
Talking about everyday stuff
like foot massages
isn't exactly something that
Humphrey Bogart would have done.
Scenes like this breathed new life
into American screenplay writing.
They stopped the story
but opened up the discourse.
They have no sense of humour
about this shit!
You know what I'm saying?
It's an interesting point.
Come on. Let's get into character.
It's as if they'd been
out of character,
like they forgot
that they're in a movie.
What's her name again?
Mia.
As if to emphasise the dialogue,
the shot remains static,
behind the two guys,
so we listen rather than look.
Take care of her?
No, Man! Just take her out,
you know?
Show her a good time.
Make sure she don't get lonely.
You gonna be taking Mia Wallace
out on a date?
It is not a date!
You know, it's just...
it's like if you were gonna take
your buddy's wife
to a movie or something.
It's just good company, that's all.
It's not a date.
It's definitely not a date.
This emphasis on the surrealism
of everyday talk
became known as Tarantinoesque,
after the film's writer-director,
Quentin Tarantino.
How are you boys doing?
Tarantinoesque somehow meant
both more real and less real
than life at the same time.
Want to borrow my dress?
(CHUCKLES)
And Tarantino wasn't only
significant for his dialogue.
Like Scorsese,
he was a hyperlink to film history.
For example he championed in America
this Hong Kong director,
Yuen Woo-ping,
whom we've already met.
Tarantino then hired Master Yuen
to choreograph
the 'Kill Bill' films.
And look at this scene in
Tarantino's film 'Reservoir Dogs'.
You've just got blood
in your eyes, alright?
(TYRES SCREECH)
In long lens, wearing black glasses,
Harvey Keitel shoots
the police with two guns.
(GUNFIRE)
Go!
Five years earlier,
in Ringo Lam's Hong Kong film
'City on Fire',
Danny Lee, in black glasses,
shoots the police with two guns.
And here's the climax
of 'Reservoir Dogs'.
Three jewel thieves
pull guns on each other.
A death triangle. A warehouse.
A police mole's bleeding.
Wide shot, then close-ups.
Let's just put our guns down
and let's settle this.
The thieves have just done
a failed heist.
Joey, if you kill that man,
you die next.
Repeat - if you kill that man,
you die next.
Larry, we have been friends...
(MEN SHOUT IN ASIAN LANGUAGE)
And here's the climax
of 'City on Fire'.
Three jewel thieves pull guns
on each other. A death triangle.
We're in a warehouse.
A police mole is sitting below them.
Wide shot, then close-ups.
The thieves have just done
a failed heist.
Talk about deja vu.
Movie making
about the story of film.
And it wasn't only action cinema
that Tarantino admired.
He loved this art movie,
Jean-Luc Godard's 'Bande a Part'.
This is its title sequence -
fast cut close-ups
of the main characters,
the letters cutting graphically
up on screen.
Tarantino used this title
for his own production company,
A Band Apart.
He was punning on film history.
How '90s.
His company logo appeared
graphically, yellow on black,
at the start of 'Pulp Fiction'.
Are you married?
Yes, I'm married.
Do you have children?
Tarantino's postmodernism
was in his writing,
but a look
at 'Natural Born Killers',
made by Oliver Stone
from Tarantino's screenplay,
shows that, visually,
Tarantino was a traditionalist.
A young couple is on a rampage.
Stone has this scene shot on film,
on a Glidecam and graded green.
Duncan Homolka, Wayne Gale.
(SOBS)
You want reality? You got it.
My name is Wayne Gale!
This POV shot is also on film,
but in full colour.
Then we're on hand-held video.
..and the Golden Globe award
to name a few. I have been shot.
This mash-up of styles is almost
a definition of postmodernism.
No one type of image
could capture the truth.
Reality was multiple and fragmented.
I will do expose after expose...
A fourth strain
of '90s postmodernism
was the kooky,
technically brilliant films
of Minnesota-born brothers
Joel and Ethan Coen.
They started the '90s
with this great image.
A hat falls into the foreground.
Trees are out of focus.
Then the wind blows the hat
and the focus follows it.
The forest comes into focus.
Then the story begins.
The Coen Brothers became masters
of visual and story precision.
By the mid-'90s, the Coens
had honed their comic-discrepant
world view...
..by focusing on what
used to be called,
in Frank Capra films,
"the little man"
caught up in events
that he barely understands.
Here, the little man's
a novice mailroom worker
but he becomes a chief executive
with the big cigar to show it.
The film's shot in blues and navies.
The novice is pure Coen brothers -
a gormless, rather asexual man,
out of his depth,
having strayed into the world
of Capra or Preston Sturges
or Howard Hawks.
Let's get to know one another,
shall we?
Let's chat.
Man to man.
George Clooney played
a similar trespasser
in 'O Brother, Where art Thou?'
..otherwise trained
in the metallurgic arts
before straitened circumstances,
forced into a life
of aimless wandering.
(HORN TOOTS)
Jesus!
Can't I count on you people?
Sorry, Everett.
Clooney was wide-eyed and clueless.
The imagery this time was golden.
Who elected you leader?
And talk about wide-eyed.
Here's Jeff Bridges, high as a kite,
in 'The Big Lebowski'.
A tower of tenpin bowling shoes.
His are handed out
by Saddam Hussein.
The war on Iraq was on
and the Coens wanted to refer to it.
And then we're in another '30s
genre - the Busby Berkeley musical.
SONG: # I pushed my soul
in a deep dark hole
# And then I followed it in
# I watched myself crawling out
as I was crawling in... #
'The Big Lebowski' brilliantly
married slacker dudeness
with surreal design, a fondness
for old Hollywood and '90s politics.
# I broke my mind
# I just dropped in to see what
condition my condition was in... #
The Coens' affection for their men
gave their postmodernism heart.
# Yes, yes, oh, yeah
# What condition
my condition was in... #
The most daring American
postmodernist of the '90s,
and one of the country's
greatest filmmakers, was this man,
Gus Van Sant.
He's influenced by a wide range
of movies, styles and periods,
and refers to them as he talks.
Van Sant's film
'My Own Private Idaho',
was about this young
narcoleptic hustler.
(GASPS)
To show what the hustler
feels like when he has an orgasm,
Van Sant used the image
of a barn falling onto a road.
Seldom had a sex scene
been pictured so imaginatively.
I think when I was a painter,
and I think by the time
I...I stopped painting,
the last thing I was painting
were these landscapes.
And definitely in 'My Own
Private Idaho', for instance,
the whole barn crashing
into the landscape
was literally
from one of the paintings.
The film was full
of empty landscape shots -
golden light, the open road.
Van Sant had intended
to shoot other images,
and use them to show
what the hustler felt
as he lost consciousness,
but he didn't have time
to film them.
But we did have the one image
of the barn falling.
So since I had this, like,
singular image,
which was somewhat like, I guess,
the singular image in 'The Shining'
of the blood
coming out of the elevator.
MAN: I think we should discuss
what should be done with him.
It was this one stand-alone special
effect that was really beautiful.
So we tried it just right
in the middle of his orgasm
because it...it was another
kind of falling, you know, I think.
Van Sant's signature film,
'Elephant',
was also about the fall from grace
of young men.
No movie of the '90s was more
complexly connected to film history.
'Elephant' was a response to the
shootings at a school in Columbine.
(MAN SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY)
The film's shot in the unfashionable
4 by 3 screen ratio.
Van Sant follows young men
with a Steadicam.
There's little dialogue.
The violence is unexplained.
14 years earlier,
the British director Alan Clarke
made a film called 'Elephant'
which used Steadicam
to show the driven,
almost trance-like walking
of gunmen in Northern Ireland.
VAN SANT: HBO was the only company
that was interested
in not making Columbine,
but they were interested
in making 'Elephant',
and they were referring
to the Alan Clarke film.
So it became known to us
as 'Elephant'
because of...because of that label.
And, um...and I think it sort of
was a similar statement.
It was, like, a very, um,
abstract statement about Columbine.
The constant walking
in Clarke's 'Elephant'
influenced the forward walking,
in real time,
without much cutting,
in Van Sant's 'Elephant',
and in his earlier movie, 'Gerry'.
These films felt, in some way,
like video games,
which became a new influence
on '90s cinema.
This one, 'Tomb Raider',
with its image tracking forward
to follow the main character
from place to place,
was particularly popular.
Yeah, the video-game aspect is...
including 'Gerry' and 'Last Days',
is coming from video games.
Me playing video games was an effort
for me to understand
what was going on
with the Columbine characters
because it was said
that they had played video games.
And, so, I didn't know
what they were.
And I had a computer,
and my assistant said,
"Oh, well, you can download
the first level of 'Tomb Raider'."
And I was like,
"What's 'Tomb Raider'?"
And he said, "Oh, that's just
like a game, you know?
"There's lots of different games."
I said, "Oh,
there's different ones?"
Like, I didn't know
anything about it.
They were playing 'Doom',
which is a different game,
but I guess you couldn't
find 'Doom' on the computer
so I started playing
'Tomb Raider'...
..and became very, you know,
amused by it and occupied by it
in the way people do become occupied
by video games.
And so the video games
were also informing...
Er, video games are often doing
what we were doing in 'Gerry'.
To get from point A to point B
you have to actually travel there.
You can't cut.
Like, in cinema,
you cut to the new location.
You actually, like, walk...
..like in reality.
Because of that, I started thinking
about, like, cinema like that.
And if the influences on Van Sant
weren't already rich enough,
he then saw the brilliant
Hungarian films of Bela Tarr.
Tarr's 'Satantango'
shows the beauty of walking too,
and epic forward camera moves, and
the expressionism of blowing litter.
Compare this to Van Sant's film
'Gerry'.
But this obsession
with the beauty of walking,
moving through space in real time,
couldn't be applied
to another Van Sant film,
'Last Days', which was inspired by
the death of rock star Kurt Cobain.
We had made 'Elephant', which was
very long, pensive travelling shots
down the hallways of the high school
that recalled Bela's work.
And we had...now we're in,
like, a house
which had no real
expansive hallways.
And so, our DP sort of like
thought of 'Jeanne Dielman'
and thought maybe we should think
in terms of that
rather than travelling shots.
Maybe, you know, more fixed shots,
which we did.
'Jeanne Dielman' is full
of such fixed shots.
It's this Belgian film
by Chantal Akerman.
Akerman films square on,
in kitchens and domestic settings.
Some of the shots of
the rock star in 'Last Days
are remarkably similar.
(TIMER RINGS ON STOVE)
(PHONE RINGS)
(READS NOTE INDISTINCTLY)
(PHONE CONTINUES RINGING)
Thank you.
COUSINS: 'Jeanne Dielman's
one of my favourite films,
and in this documentary
that we're making,
in our section on Ozu
we put in a bit of 'Dielman'
because the camera
is as low as in Ozu.
Yeah, Ozu was also on our minds.
And because of the...
where you have your camera now,
I mean, it was, you know, however
many...30 inches off the ground.
Um, I think it was,
like, a 40mm lens.
And so, yeah, we always had it,
like, you know,
36 inches off the ground
and it was always a 35mm lens.
But not even Van Sant's
close reworking of Ozu
and European cinema
prepared us for this
shot-for-shot remake
of Alfred Hitchcock's film 'Psycho'.
The original was based
on a true story.
The remake was based on a film.
Anne Heche was playing not
so much a real person,
as a movie star
playing a real person.
Welcome to the first days
of digital.
(SCREAMS)
(SCREAMS)
Van Sant's movie departed from
the original only in tiny details,
such as here, where he inserts
unexpected shots of clouds
into the famous shower sequence.
At the moment of death,
Van Sant's woman's pupil dilates.
And in the '90s
you could show more nudity.
Van Sant couldn't quite keep
his instinctive surrealism in check
but strangely thinks his film
is very different from Hitchcock's.
The intentions of the movie
was to see what would happen
if you tried to, you know,
literally do the same thing.
What did happen
and what I learned from it
was that even though your camera
angles are actually the same,
the performances are close,
but the kind of intentions
of the filmmaker
and the soul of the filmmaker
is different.
My 'Psycho' became devoid
of, like, some of the most important
things that were in the original
which were these sort of
dark underlying tensions.
You know, in mine, it's...
..the dark underlying tensions
are kind of, like, not there.
There's something else there
that doesn't really fit
with what 'Psycho' is.
So it kind of became a, er...
you know, an example of how
you can't really copy something.
I think that...
I think it's just the way
that I've been, you know,
creating and relating to film...
..structurally,
as, um, being a language
all it's own
and being...basically
the language itself
being what the film
is about, you know -
what films are generally about.
They can have subjects,
but in the end it's the language
that's the true subject.
Jump from Gus van Sant to this man
in the first days of digital,
and you find someone pushing cinema
even further in the direction
of art and ideas.
The 'New York Times' called him the
greatest artist of his generation.
Matthew Barney
used to be a sportsman.
And just like sportsmen work up
a sweat building their bodies,
so Barney works up a sweat
making his films.
Here he's doing something
like indoor rockclimbing.
But this is no ordinary scene.
Barney's playing a character,
an apprentice artist,
working hard at his art.
The film's called 'Cremaster'
after the cremaster muscle that
makes human testicles rise and fall.
Barney rises, but other things fall.
And we're in the Guggenheim Museum
in New York.
In Barney's films,
it represents a human vagina,
and New York's Chrysler Building
represents a penis.
Barney's dressed in Scottish tartan
because in 1992 he did a drawing
of a bagpipe with five pipes,
each representing a place
where he would film.
One of the places was New York.
That's why we're here.
Maybe this makes the film sound
overloaded with symbolism
but it has the beauty
and determination
of this silent comedy, in which
Harold Lloyd climbs a building.
Lloyd encounters obstacles too.
His climb is a vertical storyline
of little incidents, like Barney's.
Now Barney's apprentice has reached
the top of the Guggenheim,
where we encounter his master,
the sculptor Richard Serra,
in dark clothes here,
who's melting Vaseline
which will trickle
down the corkscrew of the building.
Rise and fall.
Barney the surrealist
loves the texture of Vaseline.
On lower levels, we glimpse a punk
band who've impeded Barney's climb.
The first days of digital
were full of films
referring to other movies and ideas,
but few looked from such
a great height as Barney's.
There are five 'Cremaster' films.
They're a movie world
all of their own.
The coming of digital
and postmodernism in cinema
made America in the '90s
fizz like lemonade,
but the movies of the times
were innovative in another way,
through satire.
Two of the ballsiest satires
of the late '80s and '90s
were directed by Paul Verhoeven
and written by this man,
Ed Neumeier,
who's as hyperactive
and as full of ideas
as his films and his times.
Their first collaboration
was 'Robocop'.
It was certainly a reaction
to what was in the Reagan era.
Particularly, though,
it was a reaction to...
There was...in the '80s there was
a period where businessmen...
Japan was on the rise
and businessmen started kind of
reading those Samurai books
and talking about themselves
as killers.
And so there was this notion
of trying to bring actual violence
into the boardroom, as it were.
That was part of the idea.
(ROARS)
ROBOT: You now have
15 seconds to comply.
Businessmen want to make money
by launching this new police robot.
It roars like a lion.
We're in a typical power boardroom.
Fast cutting. Steely blue colours.
I am now authorised
to use physical force.
I had a theory,
which is not an original theory,
that if you did something
very violent in a movie
and then you told a joke
that you would use,
the tension of the violence
would come out in the laugh.
Don't touch him!
(SCREAMS) Don't touch him!
He didn't hear it!
Dick, I'm very disappointed.
I'm sure it's only a glitch.
A temporary setback.
You call this a glitch?!
But the businessmen try again
and come up with a more
liberal policing machine this time,
a dead cop brought back to life
as Robocop.
..their parents only
read about in comic books.
Robo! Excuse me, Robo!
Any special message for all the kids
watching at home?
Stay out of trouble.
Neumeier wrote scenes that mocked
the happy talk of TV news,
the kind of satirical writing
that we saw in films
like 'The Graduate' and 'Catch 22',
written by Buck Henry.
I think that people like Buck Henry
were a bit luckier
because they were working at a time
where you could be
a little bit more free
about making those kinds of comments
and being overtly satirical.
We've also moved into
an era of marketing
and sort of
the corporate blockbuster era,
where they're really going
for the widest possible audience.
They want what
they call 'four quadrants'.
They want everybody
to like the picture
and to like it all over the world,
almost regardless of culture.
Ten years after 'Robocop',
Neumeier penned this even more
satirical postmodern film,
which was based on
a rabidly right-wing novel
about the threat to humans
by alien bugs.
The battle scenes
were as exciting as 'Star Wars',
the bugs were entirely
computer generated.
The look was bright and shiny,
the soundtrack was explosive.
That scene where Johnny walks in...
..Johnny Rico walks
into the brain bug cavern
and confronts the brain bug,
is...you know...
He's, er...
That's every American...
Maybe not just American.
But that's every soldier
in the world coming in,
saying, "Yeah, you may be smart,
but I got a gun."
You know? And, "Now who's smart?"
Do you know what this is?
(MIMICS EXPLOSION)
Sure you do.
You're some kind of big, fat,
smart bug, aren't you?
But the politics of 'Starship
Troopers' went deeper
than making fun of macho soldiers.
It came from a surprising source.
Paul said, "Oh, gosh, I've always
wanted to make this movie
"set in Germany in 1935,
and it's about a bunch of teenagers.
"And they're all coming into
their life and it's an exciting time
"and things are happening
in the country
"and everybody's joining
the Nazi party and..."
And the thing that he thought,
that was amusing to him,
was...he said,
"And nobody knew it was wrong."
And I said to him, "Oh,
they'll never let us do that,
"you know, in Hollywood.
"I mean, a real story about
1935 Nazi Germany, you know.
"Young Nazi's before
they know they're bad."
But that's where 'Starship' came in.
So, about...oh, I guess it
was about five years later.
I thought, "Oh, you could do that
with this."
Officer on deck.
Carry on.
Detail...dismissed.
I think some people
consider it camp.
And what Paul and I decided to do
was we decided not to tell anybody
what we were doing.
We decided never, ever let on,
"Oh, yeah, these are the bad guys,
these are the good guys, whatever."
We just played it
straight down the middle.
We sort of tip our hand
in the third act
where Neil Patrick Harris
comes out in a Nazi uniform.
And that was a...that was
a bit of a controversial decision
because originally
you were supposed
to understand that
through his speech only.
He makes a speech about numbers
and this and that
and, "I have to kill
people everyday."
It's a very fascistic idea.
You don't approve? Well, too bad.
We're in this for the species,
boys and girls.
It's simple numbers. They have more.
And every day
I have to make decisions
that send hundreds of people
like you to their deaths.
Didn't they tell you, Colonel?
That's what the mobile
infantry's good for.
Later, I think, we both decided that
that was...to make sure you got it,
that that was really the moment.
And I think the audience
doesn't like that moment.
I remember being
in a preview with...
In the bathroom afterwards
all these young men were coming in,
they'd seen the picture
and they were kind of upset
because this was a picture
they wanted to embrace
but something in that ending
had said, "No, maybe
these aren't your heroes"
or "Maybe there's something..."
I think it put a little bit
of doubt into them about it
or something like that -
I don't know.
What's it thinking, Colonel?
COUSINS: This is the ending
that Neumeier mentions,
filmed in golden hues.
The enemy is humiliated. Tied up.
It has a doleful look.
It's afraid. (YELLS) It's afraid!
(CHEERING)
Triumphal music begins to play.
Science fiction
particularly allows you
to do things politically
that you wouldn't do,
that might not be accepted
as easily if you did them straight
because it's not "here",
it's slightly "over here".
It's a little bit skewed. And I
think humour does the same thing.
And if you add them together
in the right way
then you can probably get away
with murder if you want but...
Neumeier and Verhoeven combine
science fiction and politics
to create the spiciest entertainment
cinema of their times.
On the other side of the world
from America in the '90s,
in Australia and New Zealand,
at first it looks like
the big trends of the time -
digital, post modernism
and satire - were having no impact.
This New Zealand director,
Jane Campion,
emphasises one of the timeless
themes in The Story of Film,
that to make great movies you must
get your unconscious juices flowing.
The unconscious mind is
a little bit like a quite shy pet.
And you have to set conditions
where it trusts
that if it comes out and plays,
you'll feed it,
you'll pay attention to it,
you won't ignore it,
you won't scare it.
So, like, when I first
started writing...
..one of the things I realised
was that, you know,
like, for the first, like,
three hours
when you sit down to something,
you know, nothing really happens.
It's like it's testing you. "Will
you stay for that fourth hour?"
I always think you have to create
a very safe environment,
you know, personally, for yourself.
And, also, I think,
when you collaborate with actors
and people like that, too.
Their unconscious selves, you know -
which you want to get
in the interplay,
because that's where the genius is -
is also shy, it's when you know
it's going to be safe.
Once all the signs, you know,
like, you can make mistakes, it
doesn't matter, you can be a fool,
it doesn't matter.
We're here to play really,
you know?
Campion's great film 'An Angel At My
Table' is about this very thing.
A shy young woman
with a lively unconscious mind,
Janet Frame,
doesn't feel safe in the world.
Frame's training to be a teacher.
The whole class is looking,
and so is the training assessor.
In this moment Frame freezes,
has a panic attack.
Campion and actress Kerry Fox
focused the scene on
a piece of chalk.
Campion has it filmed in close-up.
(CLEARS THROAT)
CAMPION: I didn't know why. "That
will work," that's what I thought.
"That will work." I was
looking for something, you know.
I have to admit that
when I was doing that I was going,
"Well, what's going to make her
turn," you know?
"How can we visually kind of
do something with it?"
And then...just the idea that...
I guess her world kind of
crunched into that piece of chalk.
I like to be able to say,
"Look, I'm really... "
..if I need to, "I'm confused
about what to do next."
You know, "I'm not really sure
we've got this scene,"
or, "I'm not feeling the drama."
It's all about a feeling for me,
again, you know.
If I'm feeling it through my body,
I can feel that it's happening.
And if it's not
you have to say something,
because you can't pretend, you know?
You've got to kind of explore it.
I think one of the things
I believe
is that you have to be strong
about vulnerability, you know,
like, stand up for it.
And stand up for gentleness
and softness,
'cause I think they're really
powerful qualities.
'Cause I think, you know,
the so-called 'bluff leadership'
qualities
of, you know, megaphone-type
voice on set...
..isn't really helpful
when it comes for, you know,
actors feeling anxious and nervous
and trying to make themselves
vulnerable,
because they're trying to
find their channel, too,
you know, trust their instrument.
And, you know...
(SHOUTS) "Everybody! OK!
"One, two, three, off you go."
(MUMBLES) You know?
It doesn't respond.
So I always try to create
a really relaxing...
..and forgiving atmosphere.
Campion's film 'The Piano'
used very subjective images
and sounds to suggest the inner
world of a girl who's growing up.
Here the child is looking through
her fingers.
They look like red curtains
about to open onto life.
GIRL: The voice you hear
is not my speaking voice...
..but my mind's voice.
I have not spoken
since I was six years old.
No-one knows why. Not even me.
MAN: Come on!
(HORSE WHINNIES)
'The Piano' is the only film
directed by a woman
to win the Palme d'Or
at the Cannes Film festival.
The majority of,
and the highest paid, screenwriters
in early Hollywood were women,
but then filmmaking became
more male.
Women make up about 50%
of the whole world...
..and, um...
..but there's only about 3% of women
who are directors
who are actually
probably selecting content.
And, you know, it just seems to me
really sad that...
Because women's, I think,
interests are a lot different
than male interests, in large,
you know.
I think they're
a lot more, um...nurturing.
They're much more orientated
to connection.
And male interests are much more
interested in, sort of, building,
identifying their, sort of,
blustering egos, or whatever.
Bombing things, blowing things up,
being strong men,
Spider-Man or whatever, you know?
Which I don't think women do.
And I think, you know,
what's important
is to try and not change the guys -
I mean, you know, I think it's fun,
what they do -
but to, sort of, get the balance,
you know, have what women do.
But because most of the men
run the business
I think that's...
..they understand or identify
much better with male interests.
But the audience is actually
probably more identifiably female.
Sometimes one of the great betrayals
of the female
is that they want to see themselves
through male eyes.
So they're very interested
in what men do, too.
If Jane Campion was the Ingmar
Bergman of Australasian cinema -
making films about
intense human psychology -
this man, Baz Luhrmann, was
its flamboyant Vincente Minnelli.
Campion's films could have been
made in the 1920s,
but Luhrmann's bring us carousing
back into the postmodern '90s.
Baz Luhrmann defined
the first days of digital
Like the man himself, his films are
a meteor shower of references
to everything from
Shakespeare to Bollywood.
Shakespeare and Bollywood cinema
had something in common,
and what they had in common was
the blindness to taste or style
or any of those imposed...posed
ideals about art.
What they were singularly focused on
was the engagement of as many
human beings as possible,
from as many types of humanity,
to be moved and touched by story.
To deliver a big idea.
A big idea
through an emotional experience.
Luhrmann used these all-emcompassing
ideas about emotion and art,
what he called participatory cinema,
to make one of the key films
of the '90s,
his hyperactive version
of Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet'.
Captions, fireworks, splintered
edits, flash-forwards, choirs.
A dog of the House of Capulet!
Shakespeare starts
'Romeo and Juliet'
with very broad, high comedy.
You know? Stand-up routine,
really. You know?
Almost addressed to camera.
You know?
But it had to be broad,
it had to be fun,
it had to be stand-up, right?
To engage the audience,
to disarm all of them
before he suddenly goes...
"Enter the romantic lead, Romeo."
Leonardo DiCaprio -
backlit at sunrise, long lens.
LUHRMANN: In the text,
the boys meet in the town square.
We're now transporting Romeo
and Juliet to a contemporary world
that is Miami-like,
where religion and politics
are mixed up with each other.
There is no town square
in an American contemporary city.
But there is a gas station.
Because everybody,
they don't ride horses,
they drive in trucks and cars.
Where do those cars meet?
At the gas station.
Where is the town square?
The gas station.
What if we ironically quote
the world of cinema?
What if it is like a Sergio Leone,
you know, piece of cinema?
And what if it's like a western?
Right?
That would be
a good way of doing that.
Sergio Leone shoot-out
meets the town square gas station
in high comedy style.
Whether you think
we've done it well or not,
if you look at that sequence I think
you can see that that set of choices
has at least led to that result.
Whether you agree with it or not,
that's how we got there.
I will bite my thumb at them
which is a disgrace to them,
if they bear it.
Huh?!
(GROWLS)
(ROARS, REVS ENGINE)
(WHIMPERS)
Shakespeare's exact comic dialogue,
but his swords are guns here.
Go forth! I will back thee.
And knights have become street kids
in Hawaiian shirts.
I do bite my thumb, sir.
Do you bite your thumb at US, sir?!
Is the law of our side,
if I say aye?
No.
No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at
you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.
Do you quarrel, sir?
Quarrel, sir! No, sir.
But if you do, sir, I am for you -
I serve as good a man as you.
No better?
(WHIMPERS)
A Sergio Leone gunfight
shot in close-up.
A track in.
(WOMAN SCREAM)
Part, fools!
You know not what you do.
A Leone widescreen composition
and the panpipe music
from his films.
One of Luhrmann's biggest challenges
in the film was how to stage,
in an innovative way,
the famous scene where Romeo
and Juliet meet for the first time.
The audience know
this is going to happen.
How can it happen a way in which
their delicious expectation
and enjoyment of,
"It's going to happen"
can be suspended so that
when it happens it's a surprise
that they knew was going to happen?
It was so perplexing.
We were in Miami,
and this is, I suppose,
the spontaneous,
artistic, creative bit of it.
That night we went out to dinner
and there was a nightclub.
What happened was
I went to the bathroom,
and I was thinking about
the problem.
I go into the bathroom,
I'm thinking about the problem,
and as I am down washing my hands
I look up and can see a girl's hair.
And I look and I think,
"This is the most brilliant thing."
It's the antechamber
of the girls' bathroom.
And after you come out
of the bathroom, like I was -
you wash your hands,
you comb your hair -
and there's a fish tank dividing
the boy and the girls' antechamber.
And it was as simple as going,
"That's it! That's the moment."
And that's where it came from.
Madame! Your mother calls.
So it was a combination
of extremely academic work,
followed by methodology -
just work, labour, process -
and I think maybe being
open to the world around us,
and luck.
So that's how it happened.
That was that one.
Luhrmann's 'Moulin Rouge'
took his ideas about
innovative cinema even further.
At the start of the film,
the camera sweeps through
model and computer-generated shots
of the grey, dank alleyways
of Paris,
and then swoops up
to the garret of a poet.
MAN: (SINGS) # And then one day
# A magic day, he passed... #
His face tear stained
because he has loved and lost
a beautiful courtesan.
Then we flash back to the famous
nightclub, The Moulin Rouge,
where the love story took place.
It's a frenzied,
red Luhrmann world
of wild postmodern
song and love and space.
At one point the girls sing,
"Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?"
from LaBelle's 'Lady Marmalade'
whilst the men crash into the chorus
of Nirvana's
'Smells Like Teen Spirit'.
WOMEN: (SING) # Voulez-vous
coucher avec moi?
# Ce soir
# Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? #
MEN: (SING) # Here we are now
# Entertain us
# We feel stupid
# And contagious
# Got some dark desire?
# Love to play with fire?
# Why not let it rip?
# Live a little bit!
# Here we are now
# Entertain us
# We feel stupid
# And contagious... #
No-one in the world was mashing up
Sergio Leone,
MTV, Hispanic telenovellas,
fashion, cross-dressing
and the kaleidoscopic cinema
of '90s Hong Kong with such aplomb.
Reality had lost its realness
in Bazland -
the very definition of
the first days of digital.
# Entertain us
# Outside, things may be tragic
But in here, we feel it's magic
# Here we are now
# Entertain us
We feel stu... #
Luhrmann called 'Strictly Ballroom',
'Romeo + Juliet'
and 'Moulin Rouge'
the Red Curtain Trilogy.
To make them he set himself rules,
a kind of manifesto,
that were almost the opposite
of Lars von Trier's Dogme rules,
the other great
'90s movie manifesto.
The first of Luhrmann's rules
was that
we need to know the story up-front.
I mean, 'Moulin Rouge' opens,
I think, with the opening line,
it's something like,
"The woman I loved is dead.
"She was the star
of the Moulin Rouge."
'Romeo + Juliet' opens with
something like,
"Doth with their death
bury their parents' strife."
You are told right up-front that the
lovers, or a lover, is going to die.
And, by the way, a recent epic,
sort of, participatory cinematic
work in the beginning,
called 'Titanic', it's
pretty clear in the beginning
one of them's going to
end up below the waters.
So, that's one rule - you know
where it's going to conclude.
Two, in this Red Curtain trilogy,
to keep the audience alive -
and, by the way,
it's kind of after the fact -
I say you've got to have a device,
right, a distancing device.
But really...why would you do
a musical without music?
But essentially
there's got to be something
that keeps the whole
cinematic experience heightened,
so you don't fall into, ever,
a feeling that it's somehow keyhole,
that's it's psychological, you know?
In the case of 'Strictly Ballroom',
you know,
even dramatic scenes are danced out,
you know?
"Wes, come here!" You know?
It's dance.
And 'Romeo + Juliet',
it's the language, you know?
"Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?"
And then 'Moulin Rouge',
of course, it's song. It's music."
# I was made for loving you, baby
# You were made for loving me
# The only way of loving me, baby
# Is to pay a lovely fee
# Just one night
Give me just one night
# There's no way
'cause you can't pay
# In the name of love
# One night in the name of love... #
Visually this is
pure romantic cinema -
moonlight, a rooftop tryst,
reverse-angle editing, two shots,
but the music is a wild
'90s mash-up of pop songs,
used almost like dialogue, as
if reality had been remixed by a DJ.
# Don't leave me this way
# You'd think that people
would have had enough
# Of silly love songs
# I look around me
and I see it isn't so... #
LUHRMANN: In this
participatory cinema -
in particular, say, a musical -
you need to know where it's heading
and you need the story
to be extremely linear.
One thing happens
precisely after another like maths
so that you save time,
so that you can take
the human moment -
"Oh, I love you,
I love you, I love you,"
which, in a psychological scene,
might be,
"You know, I really love you" -
and music
and the expression of that
could take an extra three minutes.
And we could expand
the emotional experience of that
beyond the reality in life.
And that's where the romanticism
comes in,
is that we're making something
that happens in life
better than it is in life,
bigger than it is in life.
Better and bigger than life -
exactly what many movie makers aimed
for in the last days of digital
at the end of the old millennium.
The Story of Film was full of
the fizz and feedback of those days
and the rapture of self-loss.
But then came the 21st century.
At the end of the 1800s,
a new art form flickered into life.
It looked like our dreams.
Movies are a multimillion-dollar
global entertainment industry now,
but what drives them
isn't box office or showbiz.
It's passion, innovation.
So let's travel the world to find
this innovation for ourselves.
We'll discover it in this man,
Stanley Donen,
who made 'Singin' in the Rain'.
And in Jane Campion in Australia.
And in the films of Kyoko Kagawa,
who was in perhaps
the greatest movie ever made.
And in Amitabh Bachchan,
the most famous actor in the world.
And in the movies of Martin Scorsese
and Spike Lee,
Lars von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.
Welcome to The Story of Film:
An Odyssey,
an epic tale of innovation
across 12 decades,
six continents and 1,000 films.
In this chapter,
we explore the movies
of the Coen brothers
and Quentin Tarantino,
and discover
Baz Luhrmann's 'Romeo + Juliet'.
Almost every film made during the
first 100 years of The Story of Film
was made like this.
To get a shot to move through space,
you put the camera
on something that moved.
To film a deer,
as we do here, fleetingly,
you had to find a real deer
and photograph it,
unless, of course, you drew
an animated deer like Bambi.
But then came
the first days of digital.
Look at this shot.
Smoke coming out of buildings.
Sunlight from top right.
It looks like the camera
was on a helicopter.
All attempts to make the shot
look like a real city, photographed,
but it isn't.
These tiny horses kicking up dust
look like the deer in
the previous shot, but they're not.
A place like this
is where this shot was made.
Almost everything in the shot was
drawn on a computer like this one.
DW Griffith had put a camera
on a giant crane
to create this gliding shot
of an ancient city.
Here, in the first days of digital,
director Ridley Scott wanted
to create a gliding, epic shot
of an ancient city
with tiny people like ants, too.
Computers became central
to cinema in the 1990s.
Instead of film imagery
being made up of tiny grains
of silver halide on celluloid,
it became tiny rows of digital
information - ones and zeros.
In 1921, a boy electrician
called Philo Farnsworth
was ploughing a field.
He looked at the rows of earth
and realised that imagery
could be made
of tiny rows
of picture information too,
scanned at incredible speeds.
Jump 70 years and you get this.
A liquid metal representation
of a person
turns into a photographed actor.
Director James Cameron
had his design and technical teams
scan the photographed image
into the computer.
Then they drew shiny surfaces,
movements and reflections
to make it look like the man
had become mercury.
The technique became known
as computer-generated imagery, CGI.
Live action and animation
had been combined before,
as far back as Gene Kelly
dancing with Jerry Mouse
in 'Anchors Aweigh'.
But this was crucially different -
Jerry looked 2-dimensional,
the light on him doesn't change.
He looked like he'd been drawn...
Shit!
..but the liquid metal man
looked like he'd been photographed.
The metal seemed
to have real substance,
as if it was actually
in the helicopter here,
reflecting the light in the shot
and the head of the pilot.
Get out.
Arggh!
The implications were astonishing.
It was if cinema
had been rewound and started again
from the olden days.
The first animators
tried to show a dinosaur.
The wobbly lines show that it
was drawn with real human hands.
Now, Steven Spielberg could do so
with such hyperrealism
that we could almost smell
a dinosaur's breath,
apprehend the texture
of the dinosaur's skin,
the shadows cast by the small one...
..the reflections on the floor
of the feet of the T. rex.
This is the only surviving footage
of the ocean liner the 'Titanic'.
A flickering pan right that
shows its massiveness, its hope.
As we watch, we imagine
the grand tragedy that befell it.
80 years later, James Cameron shows
us what we've long wanted to see,
as if it had actually
been photographed...
..the sinking liner
by the light of the silvery moon.
Shots filmed in deep space
to show the height of the boat
and the length of the jump.
Arggh!
'70s cinema had been
about what we wanted to see -
'Jaws', 'The Exorcist', 'Star Wars'.
'90s cinema had become 'can see'.
This was exciting.
Movies had become spectacle again,
about the thrill of seeing,
as if for the first time.
But once the thrill had passed,
old questions remained.
The first is about admiration
or ethics.
Real human courage and imagination
goes into a shot like this.
The camera and the guy
are really strapped to the plane
as it does a scary loop the loop.
Hard work and long hours spent
in relative comfort, eating pizza,
go into a shot like this.
Despite its bravura, has reality
lost some of its realness?
The second old question
is a human question.
It's the theme of The Story of Film.
Innovation.
All techniques, including CGI,
should be used inventively.
MAN: Buzz! Buzz!
The first mainstream feature film
to be made entirely with a computer
was this inventive one.
Director John Lassiter and his team
use the new possibilities of CGI
to render shadows,
do dynamic deep staging,
and see from positions
that would be difficult
for a real camera to shoot from.
Safer in the cockpit
than a cargo bay. What an idiot!
Whaaa! Oof!
(CRIES OUT)
This was the pricey end of CGI
but, as always, innovation
doesn't need to be expensive.
CAMERAMAN: You alright?
This film was not only shot
mostly on low-tech digital video
but marketed on the internet.
No, I don't need any help. I'm OK.
What happened?
Nothing. Nothing happened.
I'm just very hungry
and I'm very tired.
And I'm very scared
and I just want to go home, OK?
OK.
But I'm fine, and we're both OK.
It had the look and sound
of camcorder video footage.
His voice is close to the camera,
recorded by its internal mike.
The whites in her face burn out -
a very video effect.
In the same year,
digital cinemas opened up
in America, Korea,
Spain, Germany and Mexico...
..and in 2001-2002 George Lucas
shot 'Star Wars: Episode II'
entirely without using celluloid.
And, as has often been the case
in The Story of Film,
Asian filmmakers
were even more innovative.
Here's Zhang Yimou's
'House of Flying Daggers'.
A blind dancer.
(CHUCKLES)
(GIGGLES)
To challenge her,
a man flicks a bean against drums
to create sounds around her.
The camera rushes forward
with the bean, then swishes left.
The bean's computer generated.
Motion blur,
again computer generated.
(INTENSE DRUMMING)
Then her sleeve garment
picks up a CGI sword.
Then the man throws
a CGI plate at her.
She's seeing and not seeing,
but so are we -
images doing things
they could never do before,
all with the brilliant
Chinese choreography and grace.
Remarkable innovation.
The theme of The Story of Film.
But if what ran through the camera
in the '90s -
digital tape rather
than celluloid - changed,
what ran in front of the camera
seemed to change too.
Reality seemed to lose
some of its realness.
Life was no longer just modern,
it became postmodern - playful.
In the '90s, American films
like 'Schindler's List',
'LA Confidential'
and 'The Silence of the Lambs'
were serious '40s genre pictures...
..in new guises.
But the real flavours of the times
were irony and postmodernism -
the idea that there are
no great truths,
that everything is recycled.
More than previously,
filmmakers started playing games
with old genres,
quoting from previous films,
making films about films.
Even the master
of New American Cinema of the '70s,
Martin Scorsese, started doing this.
Look at the ending
of Scorsese's film 'Goodfellas'.
Like several of his movies,
it's about gangsters.
But what's different
is that this gangster
looks right into the camera,
a very postmodern thing to do.
MAN: (NARRATES)
I'm an average nobody.
I get to live the rest of my life
like a schnook.
And then, out of nowhere, Joe Pesci
shoots right down the lens -
a surprising shot until we remember
that one of the oldest films
ever made,
'The Great Train Robbery',
did the same thing.
Scorsese knew this shot
and repeated it.
Film quoting film,
a very '90s thing to do.
American movies of the '90s were
full of playful twists on old films.
In this classic film noir
from the '40s, for example,
two killers are about to do a hit.
The lighting's dark, the shadows
are from German expressionism
and, typically, the killers
don't say much.
There's little dialogue.
Compare that to this scene
of two killers about to do a hit
in one of the most influential
gangster pictures of the '90s,
'Pulp Fiction'.
The lighting's much brighter
but what's more noticeable
is that in 'Pulp Fiction'
they talk...a lot.
I ain't saying it's right.
But you're saying a foot massage
don't mean nothing.
I'm saying it does.
Now, look, I've given a million
ladies a million foot massages
and they all meant something.
We act like they don't,
but they do.
Talking about everyday stuff
like foot massages
isn't exactly something that
Humphrey Bogart would have done.
Scenes like this breathed new life
into American screenplay writing.
They stopped the story
but opened up the discourse.
They have no sense of humour
about this shit!
You know what I'm saying?
It's an interesting point.
Come on. Let's get into character.
It's as if they'd been
out of character,
like they forgot
that they're in a movie.
What's her name again?
Mia.
As if to emphasise the dialogue,
the shot remains static,
behind the two guys,
so we listen rather than look.
Take care of her?
No, Man! Just take her out,
you know?
Show her a good time.
Make sure she don't get lonely.
You gonna be taking Mia Wallace
out on a date?
It is not a date!
You know, it's just...
it's like if you were gonna take
your buddy's wife
to a movie or something.
It's just good company, that's all.
It's not a date.
It's definitely not a date.
This emphasis on the surrealism
of everyday talk
became known as Tarantinoesque,
after the film's writer-director,
Quentin Tarantino.
How are you boys doing?
Tarantinoesque somehow meant
both more real and less real
than life at the same time.
Want to borrow my dress?
(CHUCKLES)
And Tarantino wasn't only
significant for his dialogue.
Like Scorsese,
he was a hyperlink to film history.
For example he championed in America
this Hong Kong director,
Yuen Woo-ping,
whom we've already met.
Tarantino then hired Master Yuen
to choreograph
the 'Kill Bill' films.
And look at this scene in
Tarantino's film 'Reservoir Dogs'.
You've just got blood
in your eyes, alright?
(TYRES SCREECH)
In long lens, wearing black glasses,
Harvey Keitel shoots
the police with two guns.
(GUNFIRE)
Go!
Five years earlier,
in Ringo Lam's Hong Kong film
'City on Fire',
Danny Lee, in black glasses,
shoots the police with two guns.
And here's the climax
of 'Reservoir Dogs'.
Three jewel thieves
pull guns on each other.
A death triangle. A warehouse.
A police mole's bleeding.
Wide shot, then close-ups.
Let's just put our guns down
and let's settle this.
The thieves have just done
a failed heist.
Joey, if you kill that man,
you die next.
Repeat - if you kill that man,
you die next.
Larry, we have been friends...
(MEN SHOUT IN ASIAN LANGUAGE)
And here's the climax
of 'City on Fire'.
Three jewel thieves pull guns
on each other. A death triangle.
We're in a warehouse.
A police mole is sitting below them.
Wide shot, then close-ups.
The thieves have just done
a failed heist.
Talk about deja vu.
Movie making
about the story of film.
And it wasn't only action cinema
that Tarantino admired.
He loved this art movie,
Jean-Luc Godard's 'Bande a Part'.
This is its title sequence -
fast cut close-ups
of the main characters,
the letters cutting graphically
up on screen.
Tarantino used this title
for his own production company,
A Band Apart.
He was punning on film history.
How '90s.
His company logo appeared
graphically, yellow on black,
at the start of 'Pulp Fiction'.
Are you married?
Yes, I'm married.
Do you have children?
Tarantino's postmodernism
was in his writing,
but a look
at 'Natural Born Killers',
made by Oliver Stone
from Tarantino's screenplay,
shows that, visually,
Tarantino was a traditionalist.
A young couple is on a rampage.
Stone has this scene shot on film,
on a Glidecam and graded green.
Duncan Homolka, Wayne Gale.
(SOBS)
You want reality? You got it.
My name is Wayne Gale!
This POV shot is also on film,
but in full colour.
Then we're on hand-held video.
..and the Golden Globe award
to name a few. I have been shot.
This mash-up of styles is almost
a definition of postmodernism.
No one type of image
could capture the truth.
Reality was multiple and fragmented.
I will do expose after expose...
A fourth strain
of '90s postmodernism
was the kooky,
technically brilliant films
of Minnesota-born brothers
Joel and Ethan Coen.
They started the '90s
with this great image.
A hat falls into the foreground.
Trees are out of focus.
Then the wind blows the hat
and the focus follows it.
The forest comes into focus.
Then the story begins.
The Coen Brothers became masters
of visual and story precision.
By the mid-'90s, the Coens
had honed their comic-discrepant
world view...
..by focusing on what
used to be called,
in Frank Capra films,
"the little man"
caught up in events
that he barely understands.
Here, the little man's
a novice mailroom worker
but he becomes a chief executive
with the big cigar to show it.
The film's shot in blues and navies.
The novice is pure Coen brothers -
a gormless, rather asexual man,
out of his depth,
having strayed into the world
of Capra or Preston Sturges
or Howard Hawks.
Let's get to know one another,
shall we?
Let's chat.
Man to man.
George Clooney played
a similar trespasser
in 'O Brother, Where art Thou?'
..otherwise trained
in the metallurgic arts
before straitened circumstances,
forced into a life
of aimless wandering.
(HORN TOOTS)
Jesus!
Can't I count on you people?
Sorry, Everett.
Clooney was wide-eyed and clueless.
The imagery this time was golden.
Who elected you leader?
And talk about wide-eyed.
Here's Jeff Bridges, high as a kite,
in 'The Big Lebowski'.
A tower of tenpin bowling shoes.
His are handed out
by Saddam Hussein.
The war on Iraq was on
and the Coens wanted to refer to it.
And then we're in another '30s
genre - the Busby Berkeley musical.
SONG: # I pushed my soul
in a deep dark hole
# And then I followed it in
# I watched myself crawling out
as I was crawling in... #
'The Big Lebowski' brilliantly
married slacker dudeness
with surreal design, a fondness
for old Hollywood and '90s politics.
# I broke my mind
# I just dropped in to see what
condition my condition was in... #
The Coens' affection for their men
gave their postmodernism heart.
# Yes, yes, oh, yeah
# What condition
my condition was in... #
The most daring American
postmodernist of the '90s,
and one of the country's
greatest filmmakers, was this man,
Gus Van Sant.
He's influenced by a wide range
of movies, styles and periods,
and refers to them as he talks.
Van Sant's film
'My Own Private Idaho',
was about this young
narcoleptic hustler.
(GASPS)
To show what the hustler
feels like when he has an orgasm,
Van Sant used the image
of a barn falling onto a road.
Seldom had a sex scene
been pictured so imaginatively.
I think when I was a painter,
and I think by the time
I...I stopped painting,
the last thing I was painting
were these landscapes.
And definitely in 'My Own
Private Idaho', for instance,
the whole barn crashing
into the landscape
was literally
from one of the paintings.
The film was full
of empty landscape shots -
golden light, the open road.
Van Sant had intended
to shoot other images,
and use them to show
what the hustler felt
as he lost consciousness,
but he didn't have time
to film them.
But we did have the one image
of the barn falling.
So since I had this, like,
singular image,
which was somewhat like, I guess,
the singular image in 'The Shining'
of the blood
coming out of the elevator.
MAN: I think we should discuss
what should be done with him.
It was this one stand-alone special
effect that was really beautiful.
So we tried it just right
in the middle of his orgasm
because it...it was another
kind of falling, you know, I think.
Van Sant's signature film,
'Elephant',
was also about the fall from grace
of young men.
No movie of the '90s was more
complexly connected to film history.
'Elephant' was a response to the
shootings at a school in Columbine.
(MAN SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY)
The film's shot in the unfashionable
4 by 3 screen ratio.
Van Sant follows young men
with a Steadicam.
There's little dialogue.
The violence is unexplained.
14 years earlier,
the British director Alan Clarke
made a film called 'Elephant'
which used Steadicam
to show the driven,
almost trance-like walking
of gunmen in Northern Ireland.
VAN SANT: HBO was the only company
that was interested
in not making Columbine,
but they were interested
in making 'Elephant',
and they were referring
to the Alan Clarke film.
So it became known to us
as 'Elephant'
because of...because of that label.
And, um...and I think it sort of
was a similar statement.
It was, like, a very, um,
abstract statement about Columbine.
The constant walking
in Clarke's 'Elephant'
influenced the forward walking,
in real time,
without much cutting,
in Van Sant's 'Elephant',
and in his earlier movie, 'Gerry'.
These films felt, in some way,
like video games,
which became a new influence
on '90s cinema.
This one, 'Tomb Raider',
with its image tracking forward
to follow the main character
from place to place,
was particularly popular.
Yeah, the video-game aspect is...
including 'Gerry' and 'Last Days',
is coming from video games.
Me playing video games was an effort
for me to understand
what was going on
with the Columbine characters
because it was said
that they had played video games.
And, so, I didn't know
what they were.
And I had a computer,
and my assistant said,
"Oh, well, you can download
the first level of 'Tomb Raider'."
And I was like,
"What's 'Tomb Raider'?"
And he said, "Oh, that's just
like a game, you know?
"There's lots of different games."
I said, "Oh,
there's different ones?"
Like, I didn't know
anything about it.
They were playing 'Doom',
which is a different game,
but I guess you couldn't
find 'Doom' on the computer
so I started playing
'Tomb Raider'...
..and became very, you know,
amused by it and occupied by it
in the way people do become occupied
by video games.
And so the video games
were also informing...
Er, video games are often doing
what we were doing in 'Gerry'.
To get from point A to point B
you have to actually travel there.
You can't cut.
Like, in cinema,
you cut to the new location.
You actually, like, walk...
..like in reality.
Because of that, I started thinking
about, like, cinema like that.
And if the influences on Van Sant
weren't already rich enough,
he then saw the brilliant
Hungarian films of Bela Tarr.
Tarr's 'Satantango'
shows the beauty of walking too,
and epic forward camera moves, and
the expressionism of blowing litter.
Compare this to Van Sant's film
'Gerry'.
But this obsession
with the beauty of walking,
moving through space in real time,
couldn't be applied
to another Van Sant film,
'Last Days', which was inspired by
the death of rock star Kurt Cobain.
We had made 'Elephant', which was
very long, pensive travelling shots
down the hallways of the high school
that recalled Bela's work.
And we had...now we're in,
like, a house
which had no real
expansive hallways.
And so, our DP sort of like
thought of 'Jeanne Dielman'
and thought maybe we should think
in terms of that
rather than travelling shots.
Maybe, you know, more fixed shots,
which we did.
'Jeanne Dielman' is full
of such fixed shots.
It's this Belgian film
by Chantal Akerman.
Akerman films square on,
in kitchens and domestic settings.
Some of the shots of
the rock star in 'Last Days
are remarkably similar.
(TIMER RINGS ON STOVE)
(PHONE RINGS)
(READS NOTE INDISTINCTLY)
(PHONE CONTINUES RINGING)
Thank you.
COUSINS: 'Jeanne Dielman's
one of my favourite films,
and in this documentary
that we're making,
in our section on Ozu
we put in a bit of 'Dielman'
because the camera
is as low as in Ozu.
Yeah, Ozu was also on our minds.
And because of the...
where you have your camera now,
I mean, it was, you know, however
many...30 inches off the ground.
Um, I think it was,
like, a 40mm lens.
And so, yeah, we always had it,
like, you know,
36 inches off the ground
and it was always a 35mm lens.
But not even Van Sant's
close reworking of Ozu
and European cinema
prepared us for this
shot-for-shot remake
of Alfred Hitchcock's film 'Psycho'.
The original was based
on a true story.
The remake was based on a film.
Anne Heche was playing not
so much a real person,
as a movie star
playing a real person.
Welcome to the first days
of digital.
(SCREAMS)
(SCREAMS)
Van Sant's movie departed from
the original only in tiny details,
such as here, where he inserts
unexpected shots of clouds
into the famous shower sequence.
At the moment of death,
Van Sant's woman's pupil dilates.
And in the '90s
you could show more nudity.
Van Sant couldn't quite keep
his instinctive surrealism in check
but strangely thinks his film
is very different from Hitchcock's.
The intentions of the movie
was to see what would happen
if you tried to, you know,
literally do the same thing.
What did happen
and what I learned from it
was that even though your camera
angles are actually the same,
the performances are close,
but the kind of intentions
of the filmmaker
and the soul of the filmmaker
is different.
My 'Psycho' became devoid
of, like, some of the most important
things that were in the original
which were these sort of
dark underlying tensions.
You know, in mine, it's...
..the dark underlying tensions
are kind of, like, not there.
There's something else there
that doesn't really fit
with what 'Psycho' is.
So it kind of became a, er...
you know, an example of how
you can't really copy something.
I think that...
I think it's just the way
that I've been, you know,
creating and relating to film...
..structurally,
as, um, being a language
all it's own
and being...basically
the language itself
being what the film
is about, you know -
what films are generally about.
They can have subjects,
but in the end it's the language
that's the true subject.
Jump from Gus van Sant to this man
in the first days of digital,
and you find someone pushing cinema
even further in the direction
of art and ideas.
The 'New York Times' called him the
greatest artist of his generation.
Matthew Barney
used to be a sportsman.
And just like sportsmen work up
a sweat building their bodies,
so Barney works up a sweat
making his films.
Here he's doing something
like indoor rockclimbing.
But this is no ordinary scene.
Barney's playing a character,
an apprentice artist,
working hard at his art.
The film's called 'Cremaster'
after the cremaster muscle that
makes human testicles rise and fall.
Barney rises, but other things fall.
And we're in the Guggenheim Museum
in New York.
In Barney's films,
it represents a human vagina,
and New York's Chrysler Building
represents a penis.
Barney's dressed in Scottish tartan
because in 1992 he did a drawing
of a bagpipe with five pipes,
each representing a place
where he would film.
One of the places was New York.
That's why we're here.
Maybe this makes the film sound
overloaded with symbolism
but it has the beauty
and determination
of this silent comedy, in which
Harold Lloyd climbs a building.
Lloyd encounters obstacles too.
His climb is a vertical storyline
of little incidents, like Barney's.
Now Barney's apprentice has reached
the top of the Guggenheim,
where we encounter his master,
the sculptor Richard Serra,
in dark clothes here,
who's melting Vaseline
which will trickle
down the corkscrew of the building.
Rise and fall.
Barney the surrealist
loves the texture of Vaseline.
On lower levels, we glimpse a punk
band who've impeded Barney's climb.
The first days of digital
were full of films
referring to other movies and ideas,
but few looked from such
a great height as Barney's.
There are five 'Cremaster' films.
They're a movie world
all of their own.
The coming of digital
and postmodernism in cinema
made America in the '90s
fizz like lemonade,
but the movies of the times
were innovative in another way,
through satire.
Two of the ballsiest satires
of the late '80s and '90s
were directed by Paul Verhoeven
and written by this man,
Ed Neumeier,
who's as hyperactive
and as full of ideas
as his films and his times.
Their first collaboration
was 'Robocop'.
It was certainly a reaction
to what was in the Reagan era.
Particularly, though,
it was a reaction to...
There was...in the '80s there was
a period where businessmen...
Japan was on the rise
and businessmen started kind of
reading those Samurai books
and talking about themselves
as killers.
And so there was this notion
of trying to bring actual violence
into the boardroom, as it were.
That was part of the idea.
(ROARS)
ROBOT: You now have
15 seconds to comply.
Businessmen want to make money
by launching this new police robot.
It roars like a lion.
We're in a typical power boardroom.
Fast cutting. Steely blue colours.
I am now authorised
to use physical force.
I had a theory,
which is not an original theory,
that if you did something
very violent in a movie
and then you told a joke
that you would use,
the tension of the violence
would come out in the laugh.
Don't touch him!
(SCREAMS) Don't touch him!
He didn't hear it!
Dick, I'm very disappointed.
I'm sure it's only a glitch.
A temporary setback.
You call this a glitch?!
But the businessmen try again
and come up with a more
liberal policing machine this time,
a dead cop brought back to life
as Robocop.
..their parents only
read about in comic books.
Robo! Excuse me, Robo!
Any special message for all the kids
watching at home?
Stay out of trouble.
Neumeier wrote scenes that mocked
the happy talk of TV news,
the kind of satirical writing
that we saw in films
like 'The Graduate' and 'Catch 22',
written by Buck Henry.
I think that people like Buck Henry
were a bit luckier
because they were working at a time
where you could be
a little bit more free
about making those kinds of comments
and being overtly satirical.
We've also moved into
an era of marketing
and sort of
the corporate blockbuster era,
where they're really going
for the widest possible audience.
They want what
they call 'four quadrants'.
They want everybody
to like the picture
and to like it all over the world,
almost regardless of culture.
Ten years after 'Robocop',
Neumeier penned this even more
satirical postmodern film,
which was based on
a rabidly right-wing novel
about the threat to humans
by alien bugs.
The battle scenes
were as exciting as 'Star Wars',
the bugs were entirely
computer generated.
The look was bright and shiny,
the soundtrack was explosive.
That scene where Johnny walks in...
..Johnny Rico walks
into the brain bug cavern
and confronts the brain bug,
is...you know...
He's, er...
That's every American...
Maybe not just American.
But that's every soldier
in the world coming in,
saying, "Yeah, you may be smart,
but I got a gun."
You know? And, "Now who's smart?"
Do you know what this is?
(MIMICS EXPLOSION)
Sure you do.
You're some kind of big, fat,
smart bug, aren't you?
But the politics of 'Starship
Troopers' went deeper
than making fun of macho soldiers.
It came from a surprising source.
Paul said, "Oh, gosh, I've always
wanted to make this movie
"set in Germany in 1935,
and it's about a bunch of teenagers.
"And they're all coming into
their life and it's an exciting time
"and things are happening
in the country
"and everybody's joining
the Nazi party and..."
And the thing that he thought,
that was amusing to him,
was...he said,
"And nobody knew it was wrong."
And I said to him, "Oh,
they'll never let us do that,
"you know, in Hollywood.
"I mean, a real story about
1935 Nazi Germany, you know.
"Young Nazi's before
they know they're bad."
But that's where 'Starship' came in.
So, about...oh, I guess it
was about five years later.
I thought, "Oh, you could do that
with this."
Officer on deck.
Carry on.
Detail...dismissed.
I think some people
consider it camp.
And what Paul and I decided to do
was we decided not to tell anybody
what we were doing.
We decided never, ever let on,
"Oh, yeah, these are the bad guys,
these are the good guys, whatever."
We just played it
straight down the middle.
We sort of tip our hand
in the third act
where Neil Patrick Harris
comes out in a Nazi uniform.
And that was a...that was
a bit of a controversial decision
because originally
you were supposed
to understand that
through his speech only.
He makes a speech about numbers
and this and that
and, "I have to kill
people everyday."
It's a very fascistic idea.
You don't approve? Well, too bad.
We're in this for the species,
boys and girls.
It's simple numbers. They have more.
And every day
I have to make decisions
that send hundreds of people
like you to their deaths.
Didn't they tell you, Colonel?
That's what the mobile
infantry's good for.
Later, I think, we both decided that
that was...to make sure you got it,
that that was really the moment.
And I think the audience
doesn't like that moment.
I remember being
in a preview with...
In the bathroom afterwards
all these young men were coming in,
they'd seen the picture
and they were kind of upset
because this was a picture
they wanted to embrace
but something in that ending
had said, "No, maybe
these aren't your heroes"
or "Maybe there's something..."
I think it put a little bit
of doubt into them about it
or something like that -
I don't know.
What's it thinking, Colonel?
COUSINS: This is the ending
that Neumeier mentions,
filmed in golden hues.
The enemy is humiliated. Tied up.
It has a doleful look.
It's afraid. (YELLS) It's afraid!
(CHEERING)
Triumphal music begins to play.
Science fiction
particularly allows you
to do things politically
that you wouldn't do,
that might not be accepted
as easily if you did them straight
because it's not "here",
it's slightly "over here".
It's a little bit skewed. And I
think humour does the same thing.
And if you add them together
in the right way
then you can probably get away
with murder if you want but...
Neumeier and Verhoeven combine
science fiction and politics
to create the spiciest entertainment
cinema of their times.
On the other side of the world
from America in the '90s,
in Australia and New Zealand,
at first it looks like
the big trends of the time -
digital, post modernism
and satire - were having no impact.
This New Zealand director,
Jane Campion,
emphasises one of the timeless
themes in The Story of Film,
that to make great movies you must
get your unconscious juices flowing.
The unconscious mind is
a little bit like a quite shy pet.
And you have to set conditions
where it trusts
that if it comes out and plays,
you'll feed it,
you'll pay attention to it,
you won't ignore it,
you won't scare it.
So, like, when I first
started writing...
..one of the things I realised
was that, you know,
like, for the first, like,
three hours
when you sit down to something,
you know, nothing really happens.
It's like it's testing you. "Will
you stay for that fourth hour?"
I always think you have to create
a very safe environment,
you know, personally, for yourself.
And, also, I think,
when you collaborate with actors
and people like that, too.
Their unconscious selves, you know -
which you want to get
in the interplay,
because that's where the genius is -
is also shy, it's when you know
it's going to be safe.
Once all the signs, you know,
like, you can make mistakes, it
doesn't matter, you can be a fool,
it doesn't matter.
We're here to play really,
you know?
Campion's great film 'An Angel At My
Table' is about this very thing.
A shy young woman
with a lively unconscious mind,
Janet Frame,
doesn't feel safe in the world.
Frame's training to be a teacher.
The whole class is looking,
and so is the training assessor.
In this moment Frame freezes,
has a panic attack.
Campion and actress Kerry Fox
focused the scene on
a piece of chalk.
Campion has it filmed in close-up.
(CLEARS THROAT)
CAMPION: I didn't know why. "That
will work," that's what I thought.
"That will work." I was
looking for something, you know.
I have to admit that
when I was doing that I was going,
"Well, what's going to make her
turn," you know?
"How can we visually kind of
do something with it?"
And then...just the idea that...
I guess her world kind of
crunched into that piece of chalk.
I like to be able to say,
"Look, I'm really... "
..if I need to, "I'm confused
about what to do next."
You know, "I'm not really sure
we've got this scene,"
or, "I'm not feeling the drama."
It's all about a feeling for me,
again, you know.
If I'm feeling it through my body,
I can feel that it's happening.
And if it's not
you have to say something,
because you can't pretend, you know?
You've got to kind of explore it.
I think one of the things
I believe
is that you have to be strong
about vulnerability, you know,
like, stand up for it.
And stand up for gentleness
and softness,
'cause I think they're really
powerful qualities.
'Cause I think, you know,
the so-called 'bluff leadership'
qualities
of, you know, megaphone-type
voice on set...
..isn't really helpful
when it comes for, you know,
actors feeling anxious and nervous
and trying to make themselves
vulnerable,
because they're trying to
find their channel, too,
you know, trust their instrument.
And, you know...
(SHOUTS) "Everybody! OK!
"One, two, three, off you go."
(MUMBLES) You know?
It doesn't respond.
So I always try to create
a really relaxing...
..and forgiving atmosphere.
Campion's film 'The Piano'
used very subjective images
and sounds to suggest the inner
world of a girl who's growing up.
Here the child is looking through
her fingers.
They look like red curtains
about to open onto life.
GIRL: The voice you hear
is not my speaking voice...
..but my mind's voice.
I have not spoken
since I was six years old.
No-one knows why. Not even me.
MAN: Come on!
(HORSE WHINNIES)
'The Piano' is the only film
directed by a woman
to win the Palme d'Or
at the Cannes Film festival.
The majority of,
and the highest paid, screenwriters
in early Hollywood were women,
but then filmmaking became
more male.
Women make up about 50%
of the whole world...
..and, um...
..but there's only about 3% of women
who are directors
who are actually
probably selecting content.
And, you know, it just seems to me
really sad that...
Because women's, I think,
interests are a lot different
than male interests, in large,
you know.
I think they're
a lot more, um...nurturing.
They're much more orientated
to connection.
And male interests are much more
interested in, sort of, building,
identifying their, sort of,
blustering egos, or whatever.
Bombing things, blowing things up,
being strong men,
Spider-Man or whatever, you know?
Which I don't think women do.
And I think, you know,
what's important
is to try and not change the guys -
I mean, you know, I think it's fun,
what they do -
but to, sort of, get the balance,
you know, have what women do.
But because most of the men
run the business
I think that's...
..they understand or identify
much better with male interests.
But the audience is actually
probably more identifiably female.
Sometimes one of the great betrayals
of the female
is that they want to see themselves
through male eyes.
So they're very interested
in what men do, too.
If Jane Campion was the Ingmar
Bergman of Australasian cinema -
making films about
intense human psychology -
this man, Baz Luhrmann, was
its flamboyant Vincente Minnelli.
Campion's films could have been
made in the 1920s,
but Luhrmann's bring us carousing
back into the postmodern '90s.
Baz Luhrmann defined
the first days of digital
Like the man himself, his films are
a meteor shower of references
to everything from
Shakespeare to Bollywood.
Shakespeare and Bollywood cinema
had something in common,
and what they had in common was
the blindness to taste or style
or any of those imposed...posed
ideals about art.
What they were singularly focused on
was the engagement of as many
human beings as possible,
from as many types of humanity,
to be moved and touched by story.
To deliver a big idea.
A big idea
through an emotional experience.
Luhrmann used these all-emcompassing
ideas about emotion and art,
what he called participatory cinema,
to make one of the key films
of the '90s,
his hyperactive version
of Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet'.
Captions, fireworks, splintered
edits, flash-forwards, choirs.
A dog of the House of Capulet!
Shakespeare starts
'Romeo and Juliet'
with very broad, high comedy.
You know? Stand-up routine,
really. You know?
Almost addressed to camera.
You know?
But it had to be broad,
it had to be fun,
it had to be stand-up, right?
To engage the audience,
to disarm all of them
before he suddenly goes...
"Enter the romantic lead, Romeo."
Leonardo DiCaprio -
backlit at sunrise, long lens.
LUHRMANN: In the text,
the boys meet in the town square.
We're now transporting Romeo
and Juliet to a contemporary world
that is Miami-like,
where religion and politics
are mixed up with each other.
There is no town square
in an American contemporary city.
But there is a gas station.
Because everybody,
they don't ride horses,
they drive in trucks and cars.
Where do those cars meet?
At the gas station.
Where is the town square?
The gas station.
What if we ironically quote
the world of cinema?
What if it is like a Sergio Leone,
you know, piece of cinema?
And what if it's like a western?
Right?
That would be
a good way of doing that.
Sergio Leone shoot-out
meets the town square gas station
in high comedy style.
Whether you think
we've done it well or not,
if you look at that sequence I think
you can see that that set of choices
has at least led to that result.
Whether you agree with it or not,
that's how we got there.
I will bite my thumb at them
which is a disgrace to them,
if they bear it.
Huh?!
(GROWLS)
(ROARS, REVS ENGINE)
(WHIMPERS)
Shakespeare's exact comic dialogue,
but his swords are guns here.
Go forth! I will back thee.
And knights have become street kids
in Hawaiian shirts.
I do bite my thumb, sir.
Do you bite your thumb at US, sir?!
Is the law of our side,
if I say aye?
No.
No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at
you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.
Do you quarrel, sir?
Quarrel, sir! No, sir.
But if you do, sir, I am for you -
I serve as good a man as you.
No better?
(WHIMPERS)
A Sergio Leone gunfight
shot in close-up.
A track in.
(WOMAN SCREAM)
Part, fools!
You know not what you do.
A Leone widescreen composition
and the panpipe music
from his films.
One of Luhrmann's biggest challenges
in the film was how to stage,
in an innovative way,
the famous scene where Romeo
and Juliet meet for the first time.
The audience know
this is going to happen.
How can it happen a way in which
their delicious expectation
and enjoyment of,
"It's going to happen"
can be suspended so that
when it happens it's a surprise
that they knew was going to happen?
It was so perplexing.
We were in Miami,
and this is, I suppose,
the spontaneous,
artistic, creative bit of it.
That night we went out to dinner
and there was a nightclub.
What happened was
I went to the bathroom,
and I was thinking about
the problem.
I go into the bathroom,
I'm thinking about the problem,
and as I am down washing my hands
I look up and can see a girl's hair.
And I look and I think,
"This is the most brilliant thing."
It's the antechamber
of the girls' bathroom.
And after you come out
of the bathroom, like I was -
you wash your hands,
you comb your hair -
and there's a fish tank dividing
the boy and the girls' antechamber.
And it was as simple as going,
"That's it! That's the moment."
And that's where it came from.
Madame! Your mother calls.
So it was a combination
of extremely academic work,
followed by methodology -
just work, labour, process -
and I think maybe being
open to the world around us,
and luck.
So that's how it happened.
That was that one.
Luhrmann's 'Moulin Rouge'
took his ideas about
innovative cinema even further.
At the start of the film,
the camera sweeps through
model and computer-generated shots
of the grey, dank alleyways
of Paris,
and then swoops up
to the garret of a poet.
MAN: (SINGS) # And then one day
# A magic day, he passed... #
His face tear stained
because he has loved and lost
a beautiful courtesan.
Then we flash back to the famous
nightclub, The Moulin Rouge,
where the love story took place.
It's a frenzied,
red Luhrmann world
of wild postmodern
song and love and space.
At one point the girls sing,
"Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?"
from LaBelle's 'Lady Marmalade'
whilst the men crash into the chorus
of Nirvana's
'Smells Like Teen Spirit'.
WOMEN: (SING) # Voulez-vous
coucher avec moi?
# Ce soir
# Voulez-vous coucher avec moi? #
MEN: (SING) # Here we are now
# Entertain us
# We feel stupid
# And contagious
# Got some dark desire?
# Love to play with fire?
# Why not let it rip?
# Live a little bit!
# Here we are now
# Entertain us
# We feel stupid
# And contagious... #
No-one in the world was mashing up
Sergio Leone,
MTV, Hispanic telenovellas,
fashion, cross-dressing
and the kaleidoscopic cinema
of '90s Hong Kong with such aplomb.
Reality had lost its realness
in Bazland -
the very definition of
the first days of digital.
# Entertain us
# Outside, things may be tragic
But in here, we feel it's magic
# Here we are now
# Entertain us
We feel stu... #
Luhrmann called 'Strictly Ballroom',
'Romeo + Juliet'
and 'Moulin Rouge'
the Red Curtain Trilogy.
To make them he set himself rules,
a kind of manifesto,
that were almost the opposite
of Lars von Trier's Dogme rules,
the other great
'90s movie manifesto.
The first of Luhrmann's rules
was that
we need to know the story up-front.
I mean, 'Moulin Rouge' opens,
I think, with the opening line,
it's something like,
"The woman I loved is dead.
"She was the star
of the Moulin Rouge."
'Romeo + Juliet' opens with
something like,
"Doth with their death
bury their parents' strife."
You are told right up-front that the
lovers, or a lover, is going to die.
And, by the way, a recent epic,
sort of, participatory cinematic
work in the beginning,
called 'Titanic', it's
pretty clear in the beginning
one of them's going to
end up below the waters.
So, that's one rule - you know
where it's going to conclude.
Two, in this Red Curtain trilogy,
to keep the audience alive -
and, by the way,
it's kind of after the fact -
I say you've got to have a device,
right, a distancing device.
But really...why would you do
a musical without music?
But essentially
there's got to be something
that keeps the whole
cinematic experience heightened,
so you don't fall into, ever,
a feeling that it's somehow keyhole,
that's it's psychological, you know?
In the case of 'Strictly Ballroom',
you know,
even dramatic scenes are danced out,
you know?
"Wes, come here!" You know?
It's dance.
And 'Romeo + Juliet',
it's the language, you know?
"Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?"
And then 'Moulin Rouge',
of course, it's song. It's music."
# I was made for loving you, baby
# You were made for loving me
# The only way of loving me, baby
# Is to pay a lovely fee
# Just one night
Give me just one night
# There's no way
'cause you can't pay
# In the name of love
# One night in the name of love... #
Visually this is
pure romantic cinema -
moonlight, a rooftop tryst,
reverse-angle editing, two shots,
but the music is a wild
'90s mash-up of pop songs,
used almost like dialogue, as
if reality had been remixed by a DJ.
# Don't leave me this way
# You'd think that people
would have had enough
# Of silly love songs
# I look around me
and I see it isn't so... #
LUHRMANN: In this
participatory cinema -
in particular, say, a musical -
you need to know where it's heading
and you need the story
to be extremely linear.
One thing happens
precisely after another like maths
so that you save time,
so that you can take
the human moment -
"Oh, I love you,
I love you, I love you,"
which, in a psychological scene,
might be,
"You know, I really love you" -
and music
and the expression of that
could take an extra three minutes.
And we could expand
the emotional experience of that
beyond the reality in life.
And that's where the romanticism
comes in,
is that we're making something
that happens in life
better than it is in life,
bigger than it is in life.
Better and bigger than life -
exactly what many movie makers aimed
for in the last days of digital
at the end of the old millennium.
The Story of Film was full of
the fizz and feedback of those days
and the rapture of self-loss.
But then came the 21st century.