Mentor Huebner Art for Blade Runner

Mentor Huebner (July 19, 1917 - March 19, 2001) was a leading Hollywood production illustrator who did storyboards, production art and creative concepts for more than 250 films, including King Kong (1976), Blade Runner (1982) and Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula (1992).

His early work was uncredited on Fiddler on the Roof (1971), The Time Machine (1960), Ben-Hur (1959), North by Northwest (1959), Forbidden Planet (1956), Quo Vadis (1951) and Strangers on a Train (1951).

As a fine artist, Huebner painted landscapes, seascapes, cityscapes and portraits, creating some 2000 paintings and exhibiting in 50 one-man shows. He also taught art as an instructor at Chouinard Art Institute.

Alberto Breccia Sketchbook (Part1)

Alberto Breccia (Uruguay, 1919) was the greatest artist of the Argentine comic of the 20th century.

He was a tireless innovator, impossible to classify, and the most awarded, admired and copied author of the country.

Winner of several awards, among which it is worth mentioning that of Amnesty International for his series Perramus (with script by Juan Sasturain), he was also the co-creator of comic classics such as Mort Cinder (with Oesterheld), the exceptional story of the Che Guevara’s life (with his son Enrigue and Oesterheld), and the grotesque saga of Buscavidas (this time, with Carlos Trillo). Immense adapter of literary works (among which Informe sobre ciegos, by Sabato and Tale oF the Cthulhu Mythos, by Lovecraft, are outstanding) and a great illustrator and painter.

This huge artist ended his career achieving his dream: to adapt the stories of the author he admired the most: Jorge Luis Borges.

He died in Argentina (where he was living since he was ninety three years old) in 1993.

His working method, his particular vision to approach and develop a story, his exquisite talent when adapting complex literary works and his tireless quest for new styles and shapes have always been one of the great questions in the life of this author and that only a few chosen ones knew.

BUSCAVIDAS

"One day I received a phone call and an anonymous voice told me that my house was going to be dynamited: I had to hide for a season. It was during this somber period that I started to draw Buscavidas. It was a story full of symbols and hidden references; I tried to keep on drawing avoiding trouble. I had to do things that, at least on the surface, were drinkable'... If one day they had come to the house, I would always have been able to tell them: 7 am drawing a weird thing, a bit funny, a bit grotesque'. Maybe that way I would be able to make them smile and avoid being killed by blows with a cross. The military were mistrustful and ignorant."

Frame from the unpublished episode of Buscavidas. There, Breccia himself appears as the antique dealer of the Mort Cinder series (Mort himself also appears) who receives the visit of the Buscavidas at his antique shop. On the table, among several weird objects, you can see a horrible statuette of the dictator Videla.

(Editor's Note) This chapter was not written by Trillo and I suppose that, maybe, Breccia created it to complete the pages of the series for an eventual publication in a book. Unfortunately, the comic is drawn and turned into ink, though without the text (and the script is nowhere to be found!).

PERRAMUS

"The main reason for me to start Perramus was the need to render testimony about all that happened in Argentina during the military dictatorship; it was my duty to do it. Drawings were, and still are, my only weapon; with it I protest: Perramus was a protest scream, an uprising scream. Now the situation in Argentina has changed: not completely, but to a great extent. There are also many reasons to keep on protesting nowadays, but it is not my job anymore... You should never stop protesting..."

Initial outline and definite cover of the French edition of Glenat. (On the opposite page: finally discarded version)

LOVECRAFT

"(With Lovecraft) I accepted the challenge completely: I wanted to know if I would be able to draw what Lovecraft wrote. I don't know if I have achieved it, but I can assure you that, for two or three years —I don't remember how long it took me-, I lived completely immersed in Lovecraft's world. I rejected other work offers and the only thing I read was Lovecraft and studies on his work. At the same time, I experimented with new techniques in an attempt to render back, as faithfully as possible, what the writer imagined in his stories."

Extract from Ancares Editora


Dorothea Holt

Published in December 10, 2016 in ArtCenter // Written by Hugh Hart

Restless, fierce and gifted, 1936 Illustration alum Dorothea Holt Redmond produced scenic designs for Alfred Hitchcock that visualized the director’s appetite for suspense with uncanny precision. Mentored by ArtCenter founder Edward “Tink” Adams after studying architecture and interior design at the University of Southern California, Redmond began collaborating with Hitchcock shortly after she became the first woman to join the ranks of Hollywood production designers in 1938.

“Working on Gone With the Wind”, Redmond weathered considerable workplace resentment, according to her son, filmmaker Lee Redmond (BFA 73 Photography). “It was really difficult when she started out in motion pictures but my mother didn’t take crap from anybody,” he says. “She’d walk into male-dominated places and deal with all these snide comments because she was better than anyone else in the room.”

Redmond, who died in 2009 at age 98, recently earned posthumous entry to the Art Directors Guild’s Hall of Fame for her contributions to mid century cinema, including Hitchcock classics “Rebecca”, “Rear Window” and To “Catch a Thief”. “Hitch was very fond of my mother because she used light and shadow to create moods with her layouts,” says Mr. Redmond. “Very few people painted that way.”

To spend more time with her son and her daughter Lynne, Redmond in 1956 quit movies, taught at ArtCenter and ­­created concept art for modernist architect William Pereira. Her unsigned watercolors included renderings of the now-iconic LAX theme building, featured as the signature image in the Getty Research Institute’s acclaimed 2013 exhibition Overdrive. Lee Redmond recalls, “My mother did not love modern architecture but the concrete spider she did for LAX really resonated for her.”

In 1964, Redmond joined the company today known as Walt Disney Imagineering. There, she designed Disneyland’s ornate New Orleans Square and conceived the archway mural for Walt Disney World’s Cinderella Castle, constructed to her exact specifications from a million pieces of colored glass.

Whatever the project, Redmond favored a brisk way with the brush. “I loved watching her paint because there was no hesitation at all,” her son Lee recalls. “Everything was direct, straightforward, right on point, and then you’d start to see something emerge from color. Using a minimal amount of paint, she had a knack for capturing a feeling that allowed your brain to fill in the spaces in between.”

An Exile in Paradise

How Jean-Luc Godard disappeared from the headlines and into the movies.

By Richard Brody. Published in The New Yorker print edition of the November 20, 2000, issue.

During the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, two months after the release of “Breathless,” his first feature, Jean-Luc Godard told an interviewer, “I have the impression of loving the cinema less than I did a year ago—simply because I have made a film, and the film was well received, and so forth. So I hope that my second film will be received very badly and that this will make me want to make films again.” The twenty-nine-year-old director was not only daring the powers of the movie world to withdraw their approval but begging them to do so: “I prefer to work when there are people against whom I have to struggle.” Godard, who will turn seventy this December, has been struggling ever since; indeed, he could hardly have anticipated the price he would pay for getting his wish.

In the history of cinema, only two other directors have made first full-length films that forever changed the art—D. W. Griffith, with “Birth of a Nation,” in 1915, and Orson Welles, with “Citizen Kane,” in 1941—and they, too, eventually found themselves in exile. Unlike Griffith and Welles, who fought to keep a place in the film industry and then, once excluded, tried to claw their way back in, Godard has remained productive on the margins, but at great personal sacrifice. His single-minded quest to unify his life and his work has had the extraordinary side effect of rendering him out of place in both: hyperreal and disarmingly present in his films; oracular and almost incorporeal in person.

When “Breathless” was first shown, it was an immediate critical and commercial success: no other film had been at once so connected to all that had gone before it and yet so liberating. The plot was a familiar one—a young man gone bad and on the run, the woman he loves unsure whether to run with him—but its execution was utterly new. Shot with a handheld camera in real locations, using available light, and edited with daring visual discontinuity, “Breathless” felt like a high-energy fusion of jazz and philosophy. The actors spoke in hyperbolic aphorisms that leaped from slang to Rilke, and ideas and emotions came and went in a heartbeat; the film resembled a live recording of a person thinking in real time. “Breathless” may not have been as endearing as Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” or as intellectually demanding as Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” but in the years to come it inspired New Cinemas from Czechoslovakia to Brazil.

Between 1960 and 1967, Godard made fourteen feature films, including such modernist classics as “Vivre Sa Vie,” “Pierrot le Fou,” and “Two or Three Things I Know About Her,” and in them he continued to outdo both himself and his contemporaries in stretching the limits of narrative film. As a formal innovator, as a social critic, as an unflinching confessor of hot emotions and cold truths, he became a singular figure of the sixties. Writing in Partisan Review in February, 1968, Susan Sontag called him one of “the great culture heroes of our time,” and compared him to Picasso and Schoenberg. During Godard’s 1968 speaking tour of American universities, one student said he was “as irreplaceable, for us, as Bob Dylan.”

Yet by that point Godard was in a crisis of self-doubt; the pace of current events was outstripping his ability to invent new forms to engage them. In the earlier films, he had joyfully embraced the images of mass culture—magazines, advertising, pop tunes, and, above all, Hollywood movies. Now he felt repulsed by the world those images signified and fostered, with its unreflective consumerism and its support for the Vietnam War. The last of this torrent of films, “Weekend”—made famous by a ten-minute tracking shot of a traffic jam (actually three distinct shots, separated by brief intertitles)—concludes with two title cards: the first reads “End of Film,” the second “End of Cinema.” When Godard finished “Weekend,” he advised his production crew to look for work elsewhere. So began Godard’s defiant withdrawal—first from the movie industry, and then from Paris. He did not make another commercial film for more than a decade.

Godard with Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, filming “Breathless.” Photograph © Raymond Cauchetier // Photograph © Raymond Cauchetier

The films that Godard has made since his return to the movie business, in 1979, are arguably deeper, more technically accomplished, and more daring than the early ones. But they are also far more fragmented in form and rarefied in content, at a time when Hollywood has accustomed even sophisticated viewers to simpler films. This unhappy coincidence, combined with the changed economics of the industry, has made it impossible for any but the most assiduous American fans to keep up with Godard’s work of the past twenty years. The last time a Godard film received a regular commercial release in a first-run theatre in New York was in 1988, when “King Lear” played for three weeks at the Quad Cinema. According to Variety, it took in $61,821 at the box office in all of North America. It is currently unavailable on home video or DVD. The loss is tragic: it’s as if American museums and galleries were to show nothing of Picasso after Cubism.

When I mentioned to some friends that I was going to Switzerland to visit Godard, they were taken aback: they had assumed he was dead. In Godard’s futuristic film “Alphaville” (1965), the hero, Lemmy Caution, Secret Agent 003, is warned that as a romantic individualist he is out of date and doomed. “You will suffer something worse than death,” he is told. “You will become a legend.” This prophecy has been fulfilled in the person of Jean-Luc Godard.

Godard works out of the basement of a modern low-rise residential building in Rolle, the town in Switzerland where he and his partner, Anne-Marie Miéville, have lived since 1978. Godard maintains that the town is outside one of the defining loops of modern life. “Here in Rolle,” he says, “you can’t get a package from Federal Express.”

I asked him why not.

“Because he comes by. I’m never in. He leaves word: ‘Call us.’ So, I don’t call.”

Rolle, set on a hillside by the shores of Lake Geneva, is in timeless harmony with its natural setting. Across the street from the hotel where I was staying was a thirteenth-century castle perched on the banks of the vast, jewel-bright lake. A hundred yards out, a small island with domes of dense foliage pierced by a proud, solemn obelisk resembled a Fragonard come to life; Mont Blanc hovered weightlessly in the distance.

When I arrived at Godard’s office, I could see the filmmaker through a glass door, seated at a broad, uncluttered trestle desk. He was talking on the phone as he waved me in, past one wall of compact disks and another of books and pictures. He sat facing a roomful of video equipment that could stock a small TV station, including a television monitor showing the semifinals of the French Open. (He is an enthusiastic tennis player, and ranks himself “ten-millionth in the world.”)

Godard was wearing black pants, black sandals, and a white T-shirt with a discreet Nike swoosh over the left breast. His hair was sparse and gray, and his face was spiky with white stubble. After several gentle politesses into the phone, he hung up and greeted me. He said that he and Miéville had long admired The New Yorker’s cartoons, and that they had clipped one that exemplified their own situation: a unicorn wearing a suit is seated at a desk and talking on the phone, with a caption reading, “These rumors of my nonexistence are making it very difficult for me to obtain financing.”

I began by asking him about his most recently released feature film, “For Ever Mozart,” from 1996, a bitter fantasy about art and mourning. In it, three young French people with lofty ideas but idle hands take off for Sarajevo to put on a play and are killed in Bosnia by paramilitary thugs. One of the victims is the daughter of an old French director who has been stalled in his work; in his grief, he finds the will to create.

Typically, Godard was not satisfied with the film. “It wasn’t very good,” he said. “The actors aren’t good enough, and things remained too theoretical.” Godard’s complaint about his movie led to a complaint about young actors today: that even unknowns, inundated with media hype, comport themselves like stars and are “less available” to direction: “They think they know what to do, by the fact that they’ve been chosen. They have no doubt. Doubt no longer exists today. With digital, doubt no longer exists.”

This abrupt switch from the sociological to the technological is typical of Godard’s conversation: his sentences, like his films, are always soaring into abstractions, or breaking off, pivoting on an instant of silence to change direction. “With digital, there is no past,” he continued. “I’m reluctant to edit on these new so-called ‘virtual’ machines, these digital things, because, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no past. In other words, if you want to see the previous shot, O.K., you do this”—he tapped the table like a button—“and you see it at once. It doesn’t take any time to get there, the time to unspool in reverse, the time to go backward. You’re there right away. So there’s an entire time that no longer exists, that has been suppressed. And that’s why films are much more mediocre, because time no longer exists.”

Godard is deeply involved with the past, and with the challenges of representing it on film. His new film, “In Praise of Love,” which he is still editing, concerns an elderly French couple in Brittany who are former heroes of the Resistance, and whose life story Steven Spielberg has offered to buy, and the family argument that ensues over whether the offer should be accepted. Spielberg’s presumption to historical authority is one of Godard’s pet peeves. When, in 1995, Godard turned down an invitation to receive an honorary award from the New York Film Critics Circle, he wrote to its chairman declaring himself unworthy of the honor because of his failure to accomplish several things—foremost, “to prevent Mr. Spielberg from reconstructing Auschwitz.”

Spielberg wants “to dominate the world,” Godard charged in 1995, “by the fact of wanting to please before finding truth or knowledge. Spielberg, like many others, wants to convince before he discusses. In that, there is something very totalitarian.” Now, in his office, Godard advanced that argument with an allusion to “Saving Private Ryan,” connecting the Normandy invasion to the invasion by American cinema. “To my mind, I think that’s even the reason why the Americans landed, it’s for the American film, and now it’s happened.” After all, he continued, “when Nixon signed a contract with China, the first thing is always the films. Cheese, airplanes—that comes later.”

Like many contemporary French thinkers, Godard believes that France is enduring an American cultural occupation as significant as the German occupation during the Second World War, and equally hard to resist. He told me about a film he had been close to making that fell through, called “Conversations with Dmitri.” It was about the French film industry under a hypothetical Soviet occupation, and he intended it to be a comment on “the American cultural occupation, the German occupation, all occupations.”

Godard lays much of the blame for what he perceives as the loss of the past, the failure of cultural memory, on the present-day American occupation. He complained to me that the young, media-savvy actors in “For Ever Mozart” didn’t recognize actors from twenty years ago, and suggested, as a corrective, that television should show “only the past, nothing of the present, not even the weather.” He continued, “They should give the weather from twenty years ago. Tennis matches from twenty years ago, not today. But what’s happening today, well, our children will see in twenty years. There’s no hurry—twenty years.”

On the subject of his own past, Godard has relatively little to say, and he has reproached interviewers for dwelling on it. As a child, he was something of a loner, yet he was anything but alone; in fact, he had the kind of refined, close-knit family that one can spend a lifetime trying to escape. Born in Paris, on December 3, 1930, the second of four children, Jean-Luc Godard had a privileged and sheltered childhood. His father, Paul-Jean Godard, was a French-born doctor who became a Swiss citizen; his mother, born Odile Monod, was the daughter of extremely wealthy French bankers. Both were Protestant, and both were literary. Godard credits his father for his taste for German Romanticism and his mother for his love of novels. He spent his childhood reading, skiing, and travelling among his family’s various estates, on both the French and Swiss sides of Lake Geneva. When the Second World War began, Godard was in school in Paris, but he was soon sent back to his family in Switzerland, and he stayed there until the end of the war.

After the Liberation, Godard returned to school in Paris, and in the late nineteen-forties he discovered the Cinémathèque Française. Founded by the young silent-film buff Henri Langlois in 1935, the Cinémathèque included both a collection of films that Langlois had rescued and preserved (at a time when old films were routinely destroyed) and a small screening room where he could show them. It was not the first film museum, but it was the best: Langlois’s catholic taste (which ranged from surrealist fantasies to B Westerns) made the Cinémathèque the hub of postwar French movie culture. There Godard and two other faithfuls of the front row—François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette—eventually introduced themselves. The three young devotees soon met two others, a pharmacy student named Claude Chabrol and a man ten years their senior, Maurice Scherer, now known as Eric Rohmer. Godard’s interest in film quickly grew into an obsession, fuelled by enthusiastic all-night discussions with his new friends while wandering the streets of Paris. To placate his parents, he enrolled at the Sorbonne as a student in ethnology, but he spent all his time at the movies—sometimes watching three films a day, sometimes watching one film (Orson Welles’s “Macbeth,” for example) three times in a row, and sometimes, according to Truffaut, watching “fifteen minutes of five different films in one afternoon.”

At the same time, Godard was doing his best to keep up with his reading: Truffaut reported that his friend would go to people’s apartments and read the first and last pages of forty books. Indeed, Godard had originally wanted to be a novelist, but he felt “crushed by the spectre of the great writers.” Then he discovered “other poets,” in the cinema: “I saw a film of Jean Vigo, a film of Renoir, and then I said to myself, I think that I could do that too, me too.”

During our interview, Godard referred to the New Wave not only as “liberating” but also as “conservative.” On the one hand, he and his friends saw themselves as a resistance movement against “the occupation of the cinema by people who had no business there.” On the other, this movement had been born in a museum, the Cinémathèque: Godard and his peers were steeping themselves in a cinematic tradition—that of silent films—that had disappeared almost everywhere else. Thus, from the beginning, Godard saw the cinema as a lost paradise that had to be reclaimed.

In 1950, Godard published several articles in a short-lived film magazine edited by Rohmer. Then, in 1952, he began to write for a new, intensely serious magazine, co-founded by the legendary film theorist André Bazin: Cahiers du Cinéma. Even his earliest articles displayed the motifs of his future film career: a love for classic American movies, political films, and documentaries; a taste for grandiose speculation and fine phrases; and a conflation of his idea of cinema and his idea of himself. More important, he used his dazzling polymathy to explode the old hierarchies: Hitchcock and Hawks were as great as Eisenstein and Renoir; Eisenstein and Renoir were as great as Voltaire and Cézanne. Godard was already imagining movies that would bring together the commercial cinema, the art cinema, and the whole of Western culture in one madly ambitious body of work—his own.

Godard may have been hatching big plans, but, from his parents’ perspective, he was still living like a spoiled adolescent. In 1952, hoping to thrust responsibility on him, they cut him off financially. Unable to support himself with his film criticism, Godard began stealing—from family members, from friends of the family, from the offices of Cahiers du Cinéma. His mother managed to find him a job with Swiss television, but he stole from his employers and got caught. His father bailed him out of jail and put him in a mental hospital. (These events are strikingly reminiscent of Truffaut’s ordeal in the late nineteen-forties, when he stole a typewriter from his father’s office to finance the creation of his own ciné-club and his father committed him to a psychiatric “observation center.”) After this incident, Godard says, he severed his ties with his family for good.

Shortly afterward, in 1954, Godard went to work on a dam in Switzerland. “I said to myself, ‘I’ll put some money aside, and in two or three years I’ll come back to Paris. I’ll manage to make my first film by age twenty-five.’ That’s the goal that Orson Welles had set.” Instead, he rented a camera on his days off, hired a crew, and made a short documentary about the construction of the dam. He then sold it to the construction company and returned to Paris, where he was able to scrape by on the film’s profits for several years. Eric Rohmer has written of that period, “Whenever people asked us, ‘What do you live on?’ we liked to answer, ‘We don’t live.’ Life was the screen, life was the cinema.”

In Paris, Godard resumed his critical writing for Cahiers du Cinéma and other journals, made several short films, and took a job as the press agent for the Paris office of Twentieth Century Fox. After a screening there of a film by the French producer Georges de Beauregard, Godard told him, “Your film is shit.” This unusual introduction earned Godard an acquaintance that soon proved fruitful: in 1959, following the success of Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” Beauregard agreed to produce Godard’s first feature film, on the strength of a story outline written by Truffaut.

From the beginning of his career, Godard crammed more film references into his movies than any of his New Wave comrades. In “Breathless,” his citations include a movie poster showing Humphrey Bogart (whose expression the lead actor Jean-Paul Belmondo tries reverently to imitate); a clip from the soundtrack of the classic film noir “Gun Crazy”; visual quotations from films of Ingmar Bergman, Samuel Fuller, Fritz Lang, and others; and an onscreen dedication to Monogram Pictures, an American B-movie studio. Most of all, the choice of Jean Seberg as the lead actress was an overarching reference to Otto Preminger, who had discovered her for his “Saint Joan,” and then cast her in his acidulous 1958 adaptation of “Bonjour Tristesse.” If, in Rohmer’s words, “life was the cinema,” then a film filled with movie references was supremely autobiographical.

“Breathless” was the first film to make explicit its relation to the history of cinema, and serious critics and viewers appreciated it as such. Yet the wider audience saw it as a gangster movie, and enjoyed the escapist fantasy—a response that took Godard by surprise. In an interview several years after its release, he said, “Now I see where it belongs—along with ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ I thought it was ‘Scarface.’ ” The offhandedly self-righteous thug of “Breathless” was not the scarred sociopath of the real underworld (as he had been in Truffaut’s original conception); he was a character without psychology, a collection of self-consciously cool gestures copied from the movies.

The offhand behavior of Belmondo’s character was mirrored in Godard’s approach to film technique. Like an action painter, he discovered a working method that exalted the inspiration of the moment; in fact, the way the shoot was organized was arguably Godard’s greatest innovation. He had his cameraman, Raoul Coutard, shoot with a handheld camera and scant lighting, partly for aesthetic reasons and partly to save money but mostly to save time. “Three-quarters of directors waste four hours on a shot that requires five minutes of actual directing,” Godard told an interviewer. “I prefer to have five minutes’ work for the crew—and keep the three hours to myself for thought.” He needed time for himself because he made “Breathless” without a storyboard—indeed, without a script. He and his minimal crew usually shot only in the morning, giving the director the rest of the day to come up with what to do next; when he couldn’t come up with anything, they would skip a day of shooting altogether. Jean Seberg, who was used to Hollywood methods, considered quitting after the first day. Two weeks into filming (and not filming), Beauregard thought that Godard was simply wasting money, and threatened to shut down the production, but Truffaut intervened.

In an interview a few years later, Godard was even more explicit about his search for “the definitive by chance”: “As I make low-budget films, I can ask the producer for a five-week schedule, knowing there will be two weeks of actual shooting. ‘Vivre Sa Vie’ took four weeks, but shooting stopped during the whole second week. The big difficulty is that I need people who can be at my disposal the whole time. Sometimes they have to wait a whole day before I can tell them what I want them to do. I have to ask them not to leave the location in case we start shooting again. Of course, they don’t like it.”

In 1960, a young model ignored a telegram from Godard offering her the lead female role in a film he was making. He had noticed her the year before in a soap commercial and had offered her a small part in “Breathless,” which she had refused, because it entailed appearing topless. This time, her friends pushed her to respond. She went to see Godard in his producer’s office, in Paris: “He walked around me three times. He looked me over from head to toe and said, ‘It’s a deal. Come sign your contract tomorrow.’ I asked him, haltingly, what the film was about. He answered that there was no script, that it had to do with politics.” The actress, Anna Karina, was not yet twenty-one, and Godard had to fly her mother in from Denmark to sign on her behalf.

The film, “Le Petit Soldat,” opens with the lines “The time for action is over. I have aged. The time for thought is beginning.” A painfully personal love story set in the context of the French government’s dirty war against Algerian independence fighters and their French sympathizers, the film shows both sides engaging in assassination and torture. As Godard had hoped, it was received badly. The left protested privately; the French government banned the film, blocking its release at home and abroad. “But since I had received death threats in my mailbox,” Godard said, “I was glad it was banned.” Godard, who had called “Breathless” “a documentary on Jean Seberg and on Jean-Paul Belmondo,” here took that notion a step further, asking Anna Karina questions on camera and filming her unscripted answers, a method he expanded and refined in films to come.

Godard and Anna Karina married in 1961. She starred in many of his subsequent films, including “A Woman Is a Woman,” “Vivre Sa Vie,” “Alphaville,” and “Pierrot le Fou,” which used various American movie genres—science fiction, melodrama, romance, the musical—to frame collages of sociology, philosophy, poetry, politics, and outright caprice. The director and his star made a glamorous pair in those years, cruising around Paris in their big Ford, but the marriage was tempestuous. Godard would often disappear; later, Karina would learn that he had been out of the country. As she put it, “He told me, ‘I’m going out for a pack of corn-paper cigarettes,’ and he came back three weeks later.” In 1964, Jacques Rivette, who had just directed Karina in a stage adaptation of Diderot’s “La Religieuse” (which Godard financed), told a journalist, “He and his wife have achieved perfect harmony in destroying each other.” The screenwriter Paul Gégauff described paying a visit to the couple, only to find Godard “stark naked” in a freezing-cold room that had been totally destroyed: “All his clothes and Anna’s were lying on the ground in tatters, the sleeves slashed with a razor, in a mess of wine and broken glass. . . .I noticed Anna on a sort of dais in the far corner of the room, also quite naked. . . .‘I’d offer you a glass of something,’ he said, ‘only there aren’t any glasses left.’ Then: ‘Go and buy us a couple of raincoats so that we can go out.’ ”

Godard thought that Karina was disappointed by the increasingly intellectual path that his film career was taking; he said that “what she really dreamed of was to go to Hollywood.” In “Contempt” (1963), a screenwriter accepts an assignment he despises in order to pay for luxuries that he thinks his beautiful young wife, played by Brigitte Bardot, expects. Michel Piccoli, who played the screenwriter, told a reporter at the time, “I’m not the male lead of ‘Contempt’—he is. He wanted me to wear his tie, his hat, and his shoes.” Raoul Coutard, the film’s cinematographer, said, “I am convinced that he is trying to explain something to his wife in ‘Contempt.’ It’s a sort of letter—one that’s costing Beauregard a million dollars.” (The co-producer Joseph E. Levine concurred: “We lost a million bucks on that lousy film, because that great director Jean-Luc Godard refused to follow the script.”) Years later, Godard said of Karina, “She left me because of my many faults; I left her because I couldn’t talk movies with her.” Karina’s assessment was slightly different: “As soon as we were happy, he tried to get at us by another means, another path. He provoked a new ordeal. One could have thought that it bored him, happiness.” The couple divorced in 1965.

Shortly afterward, Godard made “Masculine Feminine.” Though its twenty-year-old characters—“the children of Marx and Coca-Cola”—were from a different world than the thirty-five-year-old director, the film explores the same conflicts between intellect and desire that fuelled “Contempt.” In “Waiting for Godard,” Michel Vianey’s book about the making of “Masculine Feminine,” Godard told the writer that finding a woman he was attracted to and could talk to would be ideal, “like having the city in the country.”

Godard’s next romantic liaison seemed closer to that ideal, but it precipitated his withdrawal from the film industry, and set the hard terms of his self-exile. Anne Wiazemsky was the granddaughter of the French writer François Mauriac, and the lead actress in Robert Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthazar.” She and Godard first met after a screening of the rushes, and later, after seeing “Masculine Feminine,” she wrote him a letter. At the time, Wiazemsky was a student at Nanterre University, a nexus of leftist activity. Through his acquaintance with her friends there, Godard conceived “La Chinoise” (1967), a film about a cell of young Parisian Maoists who, from the comfort of a borrowed apartment, plot their first terrorist act. The film, which starred Wiazemsky, is also an unromantic love story, involving her character and another cell member. “La Chinoise” was made a year before the legendary student uprisings, and is widely held to be prescient. That summer, Godard married Wiazemsky, who had just turned twenty; later that year, he made “Weekend.”

When Godard abandoned the movie industry, in 1968, he was fleeing not just a set of narrative conventions, his own public image, and his newfound cinema “family” but also the entrenched customs of movie production. It was no coincidence that the alternative structure he embraced, a doctrinaire Marxism or Maoism, purported to grant workers control of the means of production and to promote collaborative work—in fact, Godard co-founded a Marxist cinema collective the following year. But one scene in “La Chinoise” suggests the inner price of Godard’s doctrinaire ideological allegiance: the hero stands at a blackboard that is covered with the names of famous writers and artists, and erases them one by one, until only the name “Brecht” remains. For a stupendous reader and artistic omnivore like Godard, the scene is the equivalent of intellectual suicide. Describing this period many years later, he told an interviewer, “I didn’t read, I didn’t go to movies, I didn’t listen to music,” and added, citing Rohmer, “ ‘In those years I wasn’t alive.’ ” Ultimately, the reductivism and hortatory optimism of Maoism proved too much. In his semi-apologetic 1972 “Tout Va Bien,” Godard presents Yves Montand as a director who left the cinema in 1968, in a moment of doubt, and has been making TV commercials for a living: Godard was making commercials, but for a political product, and he, too, was looking for a way out. By the time the movie appeared, he and Wiazemsky had separated.

Goddard, left of center, with his first wife, Anna Karina, on the set of “A Woman Is a Woman” (1961); scenes from later films; and from the eight-part video series on the cinema which he completed in 1998. Left: “Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie)” (5); “Hail Mary” / Photofest: Center and text: “Histoire(s) du Cinéma” (Gaumont, 1998). Right: “Passion”; “Prénom Carmen” (3), ©Raymond Cauchetier; “King Lear” / Photofest // Left: “Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie)” (5); “Hail Mary” / Photofest: Center and text: “Histoire(s) du Cinéma” (Gaumont, 1998). Right: “Passion”; “Prénom Carmen” (3), ©Raymond Cauchetier; “King Lear” / Photofest

When I met Michel Vianey in Paris recently, I reminded him of Godard’s quest for a woman he could talk to, and he replied, “Well, he’s found her.” Godard’s thirty-year partnership with Anne-Marie Miéville is a testament to his ongoing attempts to unify filmmaking and domestic life. He first worked with Miéville in 1970, on a film project about Palestinians, and Miéville was closely involved in Godard’s rehabilitation after a severe motorcycle accident the following year. In 1973, the couple left Paris for Grenoble, where they put together their own video studio; there they could control productions from start to finish, and incorporate filmmaking into their daily lives. A few years later, they increased their isolation by moving to Rolle.

Between 1974 and 1978, Godard and Miéville collaborated on three films and two video series, all of which are experimental in the best sense of the word—filled with raw thought and technical innovations—and which served Godard as a laboratory of ideas during the decades that followed. In the late seventies, Miéville coaxed Godard to reconnect with the mainstream film industry in order to make “Every Man for Himself”—but he did it on his own terms. He soon began to refer to “Every Man for Himself,” which was co-written by Miéville, as his “second first film.” Part of the film, at least, was startlingly autobiographical: Jacques Dutronc plays a filmmaker (named Paul Godard) who uneasily follows his girlfriend, also a filmmaker (played by Nathalie Baye), to a new life in the Swiss countryside. As if to confirm the film’s role in reëstablishing him in the cinema, Godard says that “Every Man for Himself” was his only commercial success besides “Breathless.”

With its first shot, a searching view of wispy clouds and vapor trails in a deep-blue sky, “Every Man for Himself” announces one of the principal motifs of Godard’s later films: some of the most sumptuous and awestruck images of nature ever put on film. The presence of nature is simply the presence of Rolle. But the pictorial richness and density can be traced directly to Godard and Miéville’s constant video production in the mid-seventies. Now that Godard had his own studio, he was intimate with his tools and was able to exercise a craftsmanlike virtuosity in every aspect of his art. Starting with this film, Godard, like a painter painting the same apples or model or coastline for twenty years, developed most of his full-length projects from increasingly complex elaborations of a small number of obsessive themes, ranging from the grandly philosophical to the painfully intimate.

Foremost among these themes are the moral combat of filmmaking and the material conditions of the art—sometimes exemplified by an actor playing a filmmaker and sometimes by the saturnine presence of Godard himself. In “Passion” (1982), a filmmaker struggles with the artistic, financial, and emotional complications of a large-scale film, the specifics of which he hasn’t quite figured out; in “First Name: Carmen” (1983), Godard plays Uncle Jean, an involuntarily idled old filmmaker enjoying his dotage in a hospital; in “Soigne Ta Droite” (1987), a director, again played by Godard, is charged with making a film that must be ready for distribution that very night. Having exhausted the stock of mythical Hollywood heroes in the sixties, and of ideological ones in the seventies, Godard was down to his last hero: himself.

After forming his partnership with Miéville, Godard started managing not only his time but also his budget; his involvement in the art of moviemaking became a matter of business. Generally, his budgets are put directly under his control by the producer, and his take is what is left over. This financial arrangement permits him to bring in people and equipment without regard to specific line items, and lets him shoot and reshoot as he chooses. It also challenges him to put up money when necessary. Yet these contingencies, too, he folds back into his art. “What sets me apart from lots of people in the cinema,” Godard has said, “is that money is part of the screenplay, in the story of the film, and that the film is part of money, like mother-child, father-daughter.”

Godard has no children of his own—indeed, he has said that making children and making films are mutually exclusive—but children, real or symbolic, have proved central to his later work. As he has pointed out, “Psychoanalysis and cinema were born in the same year.” In the early eighties, he began to treat the relations of an older director to his young actresses as a variant of the Freudian scenario of incest: the father’s forbidden desire for his daughter becomes the master script for all cinema. A section in “Every Man for Himself,” aptly titled “Fear,” shows the “Godard” character speaking of his sexual desire for his eleven-year-old daughter. In “First Name: Carmen,” a contemporary version of the opera (with Bizet’s music replaced by Beethoven quartets performed onscreen), Carmen plays on the incestuous longings of her Uncle Jean to lure him into making a movie that will serve as cover for her band of robbers. And in “Hail Mary” (1985), a modernization of the story of the Virgin Birth, Godard introduces the theme once more. Remarkably, the film that Godard originally proposed to its lead actress, Myriem Roussel, was a non-Biblical drama on the subject of father-daughter incest, in which the male lead would be played by Godard. It was only after Roussel’s refusal that, as Godard later said, “it occurred to me: God the Father and his daughter.”

But as Godard was taking on the grand themes of Western civilization—European painting, opera, classical music, psychoanalysis, Christianity—the world, particularly the American movie world, was heading in a different direction. In the United States, the appeal of foreign films has always depended on their blend of intelligence and sex, but Godard’s movies were unusually demanding intellectually, and the sex wasn’t fun. At the same time, after the financial success of Spielberg’s “Jaws” and George Lucas’s “Star Wars,” Hollywood was gearing its movies to the adolescent raised on TV, and the burgeoning American independent cinema likewise offered a more familiar set of references. Even the most striking of the independent films, like Jim Jarmusch’s “Stranger Than Paradise,” didn’t demand a knowledge of Delacroix or Beethoven to be appreciated.

Paradoxically, Godard’s reliance on recovered fragments of Western culture lent his films a new emotional depth. Yet his work of the mid-nineteen-eighties was released commercially in the United States with little fanfare—until 1985, when “Hail Mary” generated a controversy too heated to be ignored. Although the film’s outward elements seem jokey (Joseph drives a taxi, Mary helps out in her father’s gas station and plays on a girls’ basketball team), the tone and import of the film are sublime and respectful, and have even suggested to some a powerful, non-dogmatic argument for Christian faith. Many believers, however, were disturbed by other aspects of the film: Mary is shown not only nude but in erotic agony, as if she were in the throes of sexual possession, presumably by the Holy Spirit. The film met with protests, sometimes violent, in cities throughout Europe and the United States. When Pope John Paul II criticized it, Godard responded with a barbed apology, requesting its withdrawal from the Italian market: “It’s the house of the church, and if the Pope didn’t want a bad boy running around in his house the least I could do is respect his wishes. This Pope has a special relationship to Mary; he considers her a daughter almost.”

At the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, flush with his renewed celebrity and notoriety, Godard approached Menahem Golan, of Cannon Films, and asked him to produce a film of “King Lear.” Golan agreed, and wrote out a contract on a napkin from the bar where they were meeting, adding one clause: the script would be written by Norman Mailer. Godard was delighted with the plan: “It was King Lear and his daughter Cordelia that I had in mind, a little like God and Mary in the other film.” At first, Mailer balked, assuming that Godard was “hell on writers.” He was persuaded, he told me, only by Golan’s offer to let him direct his own film, “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” if he agreed. Godard’s first move was to sign Orson Welles as an actor, or “guide”; but after Welles died, later that year, Godard came up with another idea: Mailer himself would play King Lear, and his daughter Kate, an actress, would play Cordelia. This, too, Mailer accepted, with misgivings.

“I finally decided that the only way to do a modern ‘King Lear’—because that was what Menahem Golan wanted—was to make him a Mafia godfather,” Mailer said. “I couldn’t conceive of anyone else in my range of understanding who would disown a daughter for refusing to compliment him. So I turned it into a script I called ‘Don Learo’ ”—pronounced “lay-AH-ro”—“which to my knowledge Godard never looked at.” Mailer shouldn’t have been surprised, inasmuch as Godard hadn’t read Shakespeare’s play, either. Instead, Godard admitted, he watched all the available filmed versions of it: “I had a vague idea that there was this girl who says, ‘Nothing,’ and that was enough.”

Although Godard had intended to make the film near Mailer’s house in Provincetown, he suddenly summoned Norman and Kate Mailer to Switzerland. “When we got there, to the hotel, he wanted to start shooting right away, and so he started giving me lines, and I was hardly playing King Lear. He said, ‘You will be Norman Mailer in this.’ And then he gave me some lines, and they were really, by any comfortable measure, dreadful. They would be lines like, I’d pick up the phone and I’d say, ‘Kate, Kate, you must come down immediately, I have just finished the script, it is superb’—stuff like that. He was shooting, and we were getting some dreadful stuff. . . . I said to him, ‘Look, I really can’t say these lines. If you give me another name than Norman Mailer, I’ll say anything you write for me, but if I’m going to be speaking in my own name, then I’ve got to write the lines, or at least I’ve got to be consulted on the lines.’ So he was very annoyed and he said, ‘That’s the end of shooting for the day.’ ”

Godard conceded that the difficulties in their relationship stemmed in part from his way of working (“I don’t know very well what I want to do, so he couldn’t really have a discussion about it. He had nothing to do but obey, to have confidence in me”), but he also believes that Mailer was hostile to his vision of the film, which was supposed to be like “reportage” of Mailer’s relationship with his daughter. “When he saw that he was going to have to talk about himself and his family, it was all over, in a quarter hour,” Godard told me. “And that’s the little piece that stayed in the film, but he left the next day” (a mutual decision, according to Mailer). To Danièle Heymann, a journalist from Le Monde who visited the set, Godard added one fillip: “He left, being unable, he said, ‘to see himself represented in a situation of incest.’ ” When I mentioned this to Mailer, he asked me, “Is it a reasonable demand to ask someone to, in their own name, play that they have an incestuous relationship to their daughter?”

After Mailer quit, Godard asked Rod Steiger, Lee Marvin, and Richard Nixon to play the part; all three turned him down. Finally, he replaced Mailer with Burgess Meredith, and asked Molly Ringwald to come to Switzerland and play Cordelia. Ringwald told me that she was fascinated by Godard’s spontaneous working methods, but she freely admitted that she didn’t always know what he was up to. She also called attention to an aspect of his films that, she says, is often overlooked—their humor. Ringwald said Godard was “a great joker” on the set, particularly with Meredith: he “short-sheeted Burgess Meredith’s bed,” and “put fake blood on his bed, too.” Heymann had watched Godard set up a shot of Meredith’s bloodstained bed, however, and had asked Godard’s assistant about it; the assistant explained it as evidence of Cordelia’s lost virginity. The scene as filmed includes neither Cordelia nor Lear, and, indeed, Ringwald was unaware of the sexual subtext during the shoot, but in the finished film the incestuous implications are clear.

True to Godard’s later style, the film’s real story is precisely how to tell the story, or whether it is in fact possible to do so. The film is constructed around a frisky, quizzical character called William Shakespeare, Jr., the Fifth (acted by the theatre director Peter Sellars), who has been hired by the Queen of England to recover the works of his ancestor, which have been lost, along with the rest of culture, in the technological holocaust of Chernobyl. In the course of his tragicomic quest, Shakespeare, Jr., meets a reclusive professor—Godard himself, adorned with jingling dreadlocks made of video cables—who has reinvented the movie theatre in an attempt to rediscover “the image.” The professor’s ultimate creation is springtime, which he achieves, on Easter Sunday, by reattaching the petals of dead flowers through the miracle of reverse photography—an effort that costs him his life but makes possible the “first image.” This image turns out to be a cinematic crystallization of “King Lear” ’s most tragic moment: the tableau vivant in which Cordelia lies dead and her father must acknowledge the reality of her death.

Godard’s “rediscovery” of Shakespeare is a grand statement about the power of moviemaking—its ability to appropriate and restore all other art forms. Yet “King Lear” makes an even more extravagant claim on behalf of Godard himself: that the cinema has been lost, and that its reinvention, and therefore the rediscovery of all art, is Godard’s personal mission. His artistry, he suggests, can even revive nature, making flowers bloom again in spring. The cost may be great, but then the ultimate creator whose work Godard would subsume under his own is God.

Godard has said that he doesn’t have a “pile of scripts in a drawer waiting to be filmed.” Most of his films are based on stories that come to him on the spur of the moment, once the money is in hand. But one project that weighed on him for decades was a visual history of the cinema, which he started shooting, on video, shortly after he finished “King Lear.”

This eight-part series, which the director finally completed in 1998, is called “Histoire(s) du Cinéma.” It is not a comprehensive narrative history but a willfully subjective meditation on themes from the cinema that connect speculations about history and culture with an intimate yet cosmic vision of film. In one episode, Godard declares that the cinema “was the only way to make, to tell, to realize: me, that I have an histoire in and of myself.” The hundreds of video clips that he juxtaposes and superimposes are related by associations that feel as private as those from the mental screen on which the films of his life have been projected.

The first installments of “Histoire(s) du Cinéma” were completed in 1988, and their effect was immediately evident: Godard stopped appearing in his features, and the films—“For Ever Mozart,” “Hélas pour Moi,” and “New Wave”—displayed a newfound grandeur and classical balance. It is as if the “Histoire(s)” had become the outlet for the irrepressible profusion of thought and the need to give himself voice that marked Godard’s earlier work.

Godard photographed by William Klein, in 1960.Photograph from Contact Press

As the title suggests, “New Wave” is the story of the French New Wave, albeit treated allegorically. Alain Delon plays identical twins who are never seen together: the film begins with the weak one (who represents earlier directors) being rescued and dominated by a powerful woman (the cinema), who finally does away with him; it ends with the strong one (the New Wave), who finds the woman weakened and puts her troubled affairs in order. The characters speak in poetic phrases borrowed from literature; Godard had his assistant search through dozens of literary works in search of potentially useful phrases. “There isn’t a word of mine in it, not a word,” Godard told me. “Maybe one word of mine, ‘Hello, how’s it going’—I think that’s all.”

He went to the shelf to get me a copy of the CD release of the soundtrack, and asked me if I had seen the new set of CDs, with lavishly illustrated libretti, of “Histoire(s) du Cinéma.” I asked him about this diversification. “Everything, everything is cinema,” he replied. “Everything is cinema.”

As Godard’s films went off in new directions in the early nineties, Godard himself was looking for ways to expand his contacts with the new generation. In 1990, he and Miéville signed a five-year deal to move their studio to the premises of La Fémis, the prestigious film school in Paris, but the arrangement fell through. A few years later, he approached the government-funded acting conservatory of the Théâtre National de Strasbourg about making a film with its students, “The Training of the Actor in France,” but both the administration and the students were unreceptive to Godard’s ideas. At the same time, his name was floated for a chair in the Collège de France, a French academy similar to the Institute for Advanced Study, but there he also met with opposition. Thrown back on his own resources, Godard was bitter but not surprised. In his self-portrait film, “JLG/JLG” (1994), he contended that art is the exception while culture is the rule. And, he added, “it is part of the rule to want the death of the exception.”

Godard has not denied that there was also a financial motive for seeking these institutional connections. He has said that his goal is “to be a filmmaker and state functionary, as in Russia. . . . My dream is to work by the month and by the year.” He also told me that he has sold the rights to “three-quarters” of his films to the major French film-production and distribution company Gaumont. “I’m arriving at the end of my life: I haven’t made any money, I have nothing put aside,” he recently told another interviewer. “No pension, no Social Security. If I have an accident. . .”

In fact, Godard has been making videos on commission since the seventies: his clients have included Britain’s Channel 4, France Telecom, the French appliance store Darty, and UNICEF. He told me that one such video, “Les Enfants Jouent à la Russie,” from 1993, was commissioned privately by an American producer, who has never shown it. Godard himself has no copy of it. When I mentioned that I had seen it, he said that it must have been “a bootleg.” Most recently, he completed a thirteen-minute piece for the opening ceremony of the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, “The Origin of the 21st Century,” a caustic postscript to “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” in which he offers a retrospective view of the twentieth century which juxtaposes clips of feature films with documentary images of the horrors the films failed to respond to. Received with bewilderment at Cannes, it was shown twice last month in a program of short videos at the New York Film Festival. The Times review of the program failed to mention it. Both showings sold out.

In 1998, Godard and Miéville made a fifty-minute video, “The Old Place,” that was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art. “We were paid five hundred thousand dollars for it,” Godard told me. “Well, I thought, five hundred thousand dollars for a film that we’ll finish in two weeks, not bad. But it took us a year to figure out what to do, to find the images, to choose the texts, et cetera. Then, after taxes, the cost of production—what’s left?” “The Old Place” has not yet been shown publicly, and Godard wonders why not. He assumes that “they” don’t like it: “Maybe they thought I was going to spend a lot of time in the museum, film their collection.”

In the film, Godard and Miéville condemn Andy Warhol as a mercenary, reject abstract art as the work of artists who can no longer face history, and divide art into its visual component (starting with fields of flowers) and its political aspect (exemplified by documentary images of suffering). It is a provocative and disturbing work, and someone who views it in one of MOMA’s belowground theatres may be moved to take a long, contemplative detour through the streets and the Park before daring to go upstairs to indulge in the museum’s collection. I spoke with Mary Lea Bandy, MOMA’s curator of film and video, who greatly admires the piece, and is proud to have arranged the commission. She considers Godard “as complex as Picasso or Dante,” and says that he is “arguably the greatest living artist.” She told me that “The Old Place” is to be shown at MOMA in February. She hopes to persuade Godard to come to New York for the occasion, but she understands his aversion to such events: “He’s like a monk who has gone to the monastery to brood. There’s a great deal of sorrow in what he’s brooding about. The political idealism of socialism has disappointed him, yet he’s very angry about the way that capitalism is managing things.”

I asked Godard about the evolution of his politics. “We were for Mao, but when we saw the films he was making, they were bad. So we understood that there was necessarily something wrong with what he was saying.” For Godard, the “reference for measuring, even for politics,” is the cinema. He brought up the French farmer José Bové, who has recently become notorious in France for demolishing a McDonald’s to protest globalization. “At bottom, I think he’s right, but what bothers me with him is that if you show him a film of Antonioni he won’t like it. So I’m suspicious. That’s how we’ve stayed, completely, since the New Wave, we movie people. We’re pretty sectarian, even ‘racist’—in quotation marks, so to speak—in relation to cinema. If nobody makes good films, if nobody can make good films, then it will disappear. But as long as I’m alive it will last—let’s say for twenty years.”

The coming months will be active ones for Godard. Anne-Marie Miéville’s latest film, “After the Reconciliation,” which co-stars Godard, had its first press screening last week in Paris; two days later, the filmmakers presented it to high-school students of cinema in Sarlat, in southwestern France. The film will open in Paris and elsewhere in France on December 27th. “The Old Place” will première at the Cinémathèque Française in January, and “In Praise of Love” is scheduled for release in February or March. Meanwhile, Godard has also edited the five hours of “Histoire(s) du Cinéma” into a ninety-minute version, “Moments Choisis,” which will be released in French theatres at the beginning of next year.

Nonetheless, this flurry of attention cannot conceal the fact that, with the completion of “Histoire(s) du Cinéma,” which in a way is also the histoire de Godard and the histoire du monde, Godard has reached a high, remote plateau, from which he appears to be looking for a hand down. He told me that leaving Rolle might be the answer: “We’ve been saying that it’s our studio here, our studio of exteriors, between Geneva and Lausanne. The area is just about the size of Los Angeles, but here there are forests, the lake, snow, mountains, and wind. . . .But now we’ve had our fill, so to speak, of all these places, so we have to find something else.”

After our interview, Godard tossed a black blazer over his T-shirt and invited me to have dinner with him at the restaurant of the hotel where I was staying. We walked downhill from his office to the hotel’s broad, pebble-strewn terrace, where there were some fifteen widely spaced tables. Neither patrons nor staff acknowledged the filmmaker in any exceptional way. As we ordered, Godard decried the state of the world, using the cinema as a touchstone: “Before, if you had a little money, you could make a film like Cassavetes. If you had a lot, you could make a film like Kazan. Now they don’t know how to do either one. They don’t know how because they’re not interested. Producers aren’t interested in doing cinema, actors aren’t interested in doing cinema, doctors aren’t interested in doing medicine, psychiatrists—there are still a few who are interested, but that’s starting to disappear, too.”

Godard ordered a slice of fruit tart for dessert, and when I ordered an espresso he suggested I try a ristrette instead, a highly concentrated semi-demitasse, which is a local favorite. He ate the glazed baked fruit off the top of his pastry and grew wistful. “I’ve been sad for so long that now I’m making an effort to be more contented,” he said. “Otherwise, one would have reason to cry all the time.” When we parted for the evening, he told me to come by his office the next morning.

At the appointed time, I found curtains drawn over the wall-size window and the glass door, to which a note inscribed “Mr. Brody” was taped. Godard had written that he could not continue the interview because “it was not a real discussion” and was “flou”—out of focus, vague—but he wished me a better “game” with people I’d be seeing in Paris. I had been warned that this sort of thing might happen; one acquaintance in Paris had told me, “Il est déstabilisateur né”—“He is a born destabilizer.”

Returning to the hotel terrace for a coffee, I asked the waitress who had served us the night before whether she had recognized my dinner companion. The woman replied, in a rapid, animated voice, “Oh yes, I know him well. He comes here pretty often, but we leave him alone. People ask us to get his autograph for them, but we don’t do it. He doesn’t like that. He came here to be in peace, and we leave him in peace. He’s a very good customer—he’s always contented, he never complains. If all our customers were like that, this would be a dream job.”

I had expected that Godard would avoid the hotel that evening, but perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised to see him in the dining room with Anne-Marie Miéville when I went in for dinner. I approached him and said “Bonsoir.” He hardly looked at me, and, with a forced smile, emitted a chilling “Bonsoir.” Miéville scrutinized me, and then glanced back at him. I thanked Godard for his time, he thanked me and wished me “Bon voyage,” and I returned to my table.

From across the noisy room I could hear only Miéville’s high, flutelike voice, descanting loudly and emphatically: “Brigitte Bardot. . . Cannes. . . to drop off his screenplay. . . he’s waiting. . .budget. . . doing the color timing before the editing. . . . ” Occasionally, she would pause, and he would murmur haltingly before she resumed.

The scene reminded me of two films. The first is by Miéville, “We Are All Still Here” (1997), a meditation on a woman’s search for “the good man” (adapted from Plato’s “Gorgias”), who turns out to be an introverted old actor, played by Godard. The woman prods him into better manners and more patience with worldly foibles, and he endures her tender harangues. The second is “Two Weeks in Another Town,” by Vincente Minnelli, which Godard calls one of “the only two good films on the cinema,” in which a tyrannical director (played by Edward G. Robinson) clashes with his strong-willed wife, who is nonetheless his only consolation when a producer intrudes on his art. Afterward, when I saw the waitress in the corridor, she said, “You know, he’s very unsociable. Very shy and very unsociable. He hardly ever talks. She—his wife—she talks, but not him.”

Walking along the lakefront in Rolle in the twilight of the summer evening, I recognized many of the elements of Godard’s later films: the lapping of water on rocks; the constant and startlingly various voices of birds; the rhapsodic blue of the sky; the vapor trail of a small, potent airplane; the rustle of leaves in the wind; the short, hollow peal of an ancient church bell; and, most of all, the sense of a last refuge. I also noted the lack of a good movie theatre. I thought again of the filmmaker’s plans to leave town, and wondered where he could go.

A move wouldn’t be easy, but very little about Godard’s professional life feels easy. Godard has put himself in a singularly unenviable position: he has taken the entirety of the cinema upon himself, has identified its survival with his own, has assumed the burden of its fictional forms like the mark of sin. If the new generation of French directors—and, for that matter, American independent filmmakers—feel it unnecessary to confront the history of cinema in their work, it is because Godard has done it for them; they have been freed of the burden of the classical cinema by his sacrifice. At the same time, Godard’s highly particularized obsession with the past and future of filmmaking has left him with virtually no share in its present. It is as if he had exchanged his place on earth for his place in history.

As I tried to imagine where Godard could go next, Hawthorne’s story of Wakefield came to mind: a man intending to leave home for a week stays away for twenty years and then “entered the door one evening, quietly, as from a day’s absence.” Although Hawthorne gives the tale an equivocally happy ending, he follows it with a frank declaration of its darker purpose: “Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another, and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. Like Wakefield, he may become, as it were, the Outcast of the Universe.”

Vertigo Storyboards

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Storyboards: Henry Bumstead

Henry Bumstead was an American cinematic art director and production designer. In a career that spanned nearly 70 years, Bumstead began as a draftsman in RKO Pictures' art department and later served as an art director or production designer on more than 90 feature films. He won Academy Awards for Best Art Direction for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) and The Sting (1973). He was also nominated for Academy Awards for his work on Vertigo (1958) and Unforgiven (1992).

Pather Panchali (1955) Storyboards

Director: Satyajit Ray
Storyboards: Satyajit Ray

Pather Panchali (translated as “Song of the Little Road”) was Satyajit Ray’s first film, adapted by Ray from a 1928 Bengali novel of the same name. Previously, while working as a graphic artist at a Calcutta publishing house, Ray illustrated a children's version of the novel, and it remained dear to his heart as he moved closer to realizing his dream of becoming a filmmaker.

Filming on Pather Panchali started, financed by the director’s own funds and any loans he could raise, in 1952, when Ray was thirty-one years old, and collapsed and restarted on various occasions, only finishing in 1955 thanks to a grant from the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Throughout the three years of intermittent production, Ray searched for funding armed with two tools to show potential backers. One was a small notebook, filled with sketches, dialogue, and the treatment; the other was more of a sketchbook containing gouache illustrations of the film’s key dramatic moments. Ray later donated these to the Cinematheque Franqaise in Paris.

With its extraordinary, naturalistic sequences—Ray was inspired by the Italian neorealist movement—Pather Panchali never had a complete script and was made entirely from these sketches and notes. The original drawings have sadly now been lost, but these black and white copies still reveal the beauty of his preparatory work.

Pather Panchali tells the story of a Brahmin family in Bengal at the beginning of the last century. The father is an impoverished priest, and the mother is left alone to look after impish older daughter Durga and young Apu. Pather Panchali's neorealist take on the Bengal countryside (Ray was inspired by Vittorio De Sica’s 1948 film Bicycle Thieves') is rightly hailed for the magnificent beauty and majesty of its black and white sequences, which detail the simple joys of life for a small boy. Perhaps the most famous of these depicts Apu and Durga running through kans grass to see a train; on their return, they find the dead body of their Aunt Indir. Music by Ravi Shankar heightened the intensity of emotion.

Pather Panchali was the first in Ray’s Apu Trilogy, and was succeeded by Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (1959).

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Storyboards (1966)

Director: Mike Nichols
Storyboards: Maurice Zuberano

Mike Nichols was the most successful, sought-after stage director in America by the time he was approached by Warner Brothers to adapt Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? for the big screen. He had no film experience, but he was also unafraid—and the quality of his production team was unrivalled (from Haskell Wexler’s camera to Richard Sylbert’s production design).

The producer Ernest Lehman agreed to have the experienced illustrator Maurice Zuberano at Nichols's side throughout the production, which starred the powerhouse couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as Martha and George (the scenario was thought to reflect the troubles of their own marriage). Nichols and Zuberano worked closely together, as this storyboard illustrates—it comes close to being an animated stage direction. Sylbert also worked with the storyboard artist Harold Michelson on this film. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was nominated for thirteen Academy Awards—including for Nichols as director—winning five, among them Elizabeth Taylor’s second for acting.

Maurice Zuberano’s storyboards is littered with character notes, stage directions, and snatches of dialogue, reflecting the close working relationship between Zuberano and the film’s director, Mike Nichols.

Maurice Zuberano started out as a storyboard artist on the ultimate Hollywood classic, Citizen Kane (1941). He may well have provided the boards for Orson Welles’s followup, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942; see pages 40-45), although he was not credited on the final, much-edited film. He certainly enjoyed a close relationship with Welles’s editor on both pictures, Robert Wise, and they continued to work together when Wise made the jump to directing, on Helen of Troy (1956), West Side Story (1961), The Sound of Music (1965), and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). Zuberano’s last work was for Warren Beatty, on the director/ star’s Dick Tracy (1990).

Drawings by Writers

henry-miller.jpg

Henry Miller (1891-1980) spent as much time painting as drawing. When impoverish and living in Big Sur, California, he bartered his watercolours for food, clothing and fuel. He said: ”Paint as you like and die happy”.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) made caricatures and sketches, many of which were self-portraits like the one above, drawn after smoking hashish.

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) made caricatures and sketches, many of which were self-portraits like the one above, drawn after smoking hashish.

Vladimir Mayakovsky )1893-1930) called this rare pen and ink drawing, done in 1928. MAN STRIDDING TOWARDS THE SUN.

Vladimir Mayakovsky )1893-1930) called this rare pen and ink drawing, done in 1928. MAN STRIDDING TOWARDS THE SUN.

Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) drew Arthur Rimbaud repeatedly during their two-year friendship. In 1873, drunk on absinthe, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the hand. He spent several years in prison as a result and they never saw each other again.

Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) drew Arthur Rimbaud repeatedly during their two-year friendship. In 1873, drunk on absinthe, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the hand. He spent several years in prison as a result and they never saw each other again.

Mikhail Bulgarow (1891-1940) made this drawing of the household devil, Rogash, in 1928.

Mikhail Bulgarow (1891-1940) made this drawing of the household devil, Rogash, in 1928.

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) “Love Letter” from DESSINS, first published in 1928.

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) “Love Letter” from DESSINS, first published in 1928.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) made this sketch in his diary, in 1924: “ I write this very decidedly out of despair over my body and over a future with this body…”

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) made this sketch in his diary, in 1924: “ I write this very decidedly out of despair over my body and over a future with this body…”

Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) made this drawing of Gertrude Stein although the two writers did not get on. Of their first meeting Barnes later wrote: “D’ you know what she said of me? Said I had beautiful legs. Now what does that have to do with anything…

Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) made this drawing of Gertrude Stein although the two writers did not get on. Of their first meeting Barnes later wrote: “D’ you know what she said of me? Said I had beautiful legs. Now what does that have to do with anything?”

Federico García Lorca (1893-1936) drew, painted and made puppets; the inscription on this drawing, which shows the influence of surrealism, reads: “Only through mystery do we live, only through mystery.”

Federico García Lorca (1893-1936) drew, painted and made puppets; the inscription on this drawing, which shows the influence of surrealism, reads: “Only through mystery do we live, only through mystery.”

Jacques Prévert (1908-1977) made this drawing in payment for a meal at ‘Trois Canettes’ in Paris.

Jacques Prévert (1908-1977) made this drawing in payment for a meal at ‘Trois Canettes’ in Paris.

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) illustrated and painted an enormous amount; this drawing (1910) accompanied a letter to his son William with an added P.S of “Wish you were here to share a bath with me”

Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) illustrated and painted an enormous amount; this drawing (1910) accompanied a letter to his son William with an added P.S of “Wish you were here to share a bath with me”

James Thurber (1894-1961) was well-known as a cartoonist and writer. This drawing accompanies A PORTRAIT OF AUNT IDA, a story about a woman who loves catastrophes and has prophetic dreams of “tall faceless women in black veils and gloves”.

James Thurber (1894-1961) was well-known as a cartoonist and writer. This drawing accompanies A PORTRAIT OF AUNT IDA, a story about a woman who loves catastrophes and has prophetic dreams of “tall faceless women in black veils and gloves”.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) became a painter at the age of sixty-seven when he found he could no longer simply cross out a word on a manuscript without the scribble becoming an elaborate design. He said: “My pictures are my versification in line…

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) became a painter at the age of sixty-seven when he found he could no longer simply cross out a word on a manuscript without the scribble becoming an elaborate design. He said: “My pictures are my versification in lines”.

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), poet, actor, surrealist, artist made this portrait of Arthur Adamov in 1947, shortly after the playwright helped Artaud gain release from Rodez, the asylum where he had been held for many years.

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), poet, actor, surrealist, artist made this portrait of Arthur Adamov in 1947, shortly after the playwright helped Artaud gain release from Rodez, the asylum where he had been held for many years.

H. G. Wells (1866-1946) kept a ‘burlesque diary’ in the form of humorous sketches; he made this ‘picshua’ in a letter to his brother in 1890: “What is this?. Why do the people in the tramcar shrink from his presence?… He STINKS.”

H. G. Wells (1866-1946) kept a ‘burlesque diary’ in the form of humorous sketches; he made this ‘picshua’ in a letter to his brother in 1890: “What is this?. Why do the people in the tramcar shrink from his presence?… He STINKS.”

Mark Twain (1835-1910) made a burlesque map of the fortifications of Paris. Published in the “New York Herald” of Sunday, October 2, 1870. At this time the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war had just begun and newspapers the world over we…

Mark Twain (1835-1910) made a burlesque map of the fortifications of Paris. Published in the “New York Herald” of Sunday, October 2, 1870. At this time the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war had just begun and newspapers the world over were filled with maps of Paris as is journalistic practice.

Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) taught art in a secondary school for boys; he made many drawings to accompany his collections of stories and for a short time before he was shot by a Nazi he was given protection by a Gestapo officer who liked his work.

Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) taught art in a secondary school for boys; he made many drawings to accompany his collections of stories and for a short time before he was shot by a Nazi he was given protection by a Gestapo officer who liked his work.

Elizabeth Smart (1913-1986) made this drawing in a scrapbook about the birth of her first child. CHRISTOPHER’S BOOK is full of sketches, poems, details and photographs of the baby.

Elizabeth Smart (1913-1986) made this drawing in a scrapbook about the birth of her first child. CHRISTOPHER’S BOOK is full of sketches, poems, details and photographs of the baby.

Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) made ‘scissor fantasies’ to illustrate his own tales; he often made these paper cut-outs while telling stories to audiences of children.

Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) made ‘scissor fantasies’ to illustrate his own tales; he often made these paper cut-outs while telling stories to audiences of children.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) signed this drawing ‘1860, Oct.7-Villa Alberti Siena-My fig tree-E.B.Browning’. The second inscription is in Robert’s hand.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861) signed this drawing ‘1860, Oct.7-Villa Alberti Siena-My fig tree-E.B.Browning’. The second inscription is in Robert’s hand.

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841)-painter and violinist as writer-was known as a savage wit and tease. He was killed in a duel by a man who did not like the way he was depicted in a caricature the poet had drawn at a party.

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841)-painter and violinist as writer-was known as a savage wit and tease. He was killed in a duel by a man who did not like the way he was depicted in a caricature the poet had drawn at a party.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) made this drawing as a young officer stationed in the Caucasus; Tolstoy often drew on his manuscripts and the sketch above was found on his copy of YOUTH.

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) made this drawing as a young officer stationed in the Caucasus; Tolstoy often drew on his manuscripts and the sketch above was found on his copy of YOUTH.

Nikolai Godol (1809-1852) originally intended to be a painter and often illustrated the covers of his own books. This drawing of Pushkin was done in the 1830s.

Nikolai Godol (1809-1852) originally intended to be a painter and often illustrated the covers of his own books. This drawing of Pushkin was done in the 1830s.

Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) often sketched in the drawing room at Haworth with Emily, Anne and Branwell; this drawing shows the writer as an ugly duckling waving goodbye to potential suitors.

Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855) often sketched in the drawing room at Haworth with Emily, Anne and Branwell; this drawing shows the writer as an ugly duckling waving goodbye to potential suitors.

Emily Bronte (1818-1848) filled her diaries with drawings of family life; this diary paper shows herself and Anne working at the dinning room table.

Emily Bronte (1818-1848) filled her diaries with drawings of family life; this diary paper shows herself and Anne working at the dinning room table.

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) made this self-caricature in November, 1943, in the Wheatsheaf Tavern, London.

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) made this self-caricature in November, 1943, in the Wheatsheaf Tavern, London.

HOLLYWOOD’S GOLDEN AGE STORYBOARDS - Part 1

Man Hunt (1941)

Director: Fritz Lang
Storyboard: Wiard B. Ihnen

The great Austrian Expressionist director Fritz Lang fled his homeland in the late 1930s (rather than make propaganda films for Joseph Goebbels), and Man Hunt was the first of four anti-Nazi films he made in the U.S. The director of Metropolis (1927) worked with art director Wiard B. Ihnen on this production, which starred Walter Pidgeon as Captain Alan Thorndike, an American soldier and big game hunter who happens upon Hitler’s lodge while hunting in Bavaria and takes aim. Captured, Thorndike is tortured and left for dead by a river—but he finds a rowboat and attempts to navigate it to port without being discovered by the Nazis, who rake the water's surface with a searchlight.

The boards shown here, in graphite pencil, are classic film noir, with large parts of the page left in the dark. Thorndike ("Thorndyke”) must turn in order to avoid the lights before reaching port where he can stow away on a ship to Britain. Ihnen, who was born in New Jersey, trained as an architect and worked for over three decades as a Hollywood art director. He was married to the legendary costume designer Edith Head.

Wiard B. Ihnen’s boards, with their bold use of chiaroscuro, prefigure the expressionistic feel of Lang’s film, which was based on Geoffrey Household’s classic 1939 thriller, Rogue Male.

Thorndike is forced to abandon his vessel when a patrol boat nears.

Captain Thorndike attempts to avoid detection in his rowboat.

The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)

Director: Orson Welles
Storyboard: unattributed

The Magnificent Ambersons is Orson Welles’s tragic masterpiece, his much-hyped follow-up to Citizen Kane (1941). It featured an extravagant set constructed at RKO’s studios—the Ambersons’ mansion, with its moving walls, which provided the setting for Welles’s beloved central ballroom sequence and extensive tracking shots (drastically cut in the theatrical release).
Audacious and daring, The Magnificent Ambersons suffered one of Hollywood’s most traumatic post-production periods. The writer-director had negotiated away his final cut and was working in Brazil on another project when he delivered a (second edit) 131-minute film. It received poor responses from a test audience and RKO took control.
“Everybody they could find was cutting it,” recalled Welles later. It is believed the film went from 131 to 88 minutes, and many sequences were reshot, without Welles’s approval, by the film’s editor, Robert Wise. It was also given a new, more optimistic ending. The edited footage was later destroyed and the original cut has disappeared; all that remains is Welles’s script and some storyboards, unattributed.
The Magnificent Ambersons left Welles with a poor reputation in Hollywood and he struggled to find work after it, yet the film is beloved by critics and cineastes and considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made, its tortured history providing a poignant backstory to the action onscreen.

Albert S. D’Agostino was RKO's art director and supervised the glossy look of all the studio’s films, including The Magnificent Ambersons; he would certainly have had control over the Amberson Mansion, as constructed in RKO’s Gower Street Studios.

The Big Sleep (1946)

Director: Howard Hawks
Storyboard: Bill Herwig

This Warner Bros, production is the Hollywood noir classic; an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel directed by Howard Hawks, co-written by William Faulkner, and starring Humphrey Bogart as hardboiled gumshoe Philip Marlowe, with Lauren Bacall as Vivian Rutledge.
Although the plot is somewhat convoluted. The Big Sleep is still considered one of the greatest movies of that era. The look of the film in particular is spectacular; moodily shot by Sid Hickox, its claustrophobic interiors (with exteriors almost always characterized by rain) were art directed by the renowned German emigre Carl Jules Weyl. As an architect, Weyl designed the Hollywood playhouse (now Avalon Hollywood); under contract at Warner Bros, until 1947, he also designed Casablanca (1942).
The storyboards shown here are credited to Bill Herwig, a former Disney animator of the 1930s, and are a clear indication of the mood of the piece. The original cut of the film in 1945 was re-edited and released in 1946.

Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe with Lauren Bacall as Vivian Rutledge in The Big Sleep.

This page from Bill Herwig’s boards, drawn in pencil, depicts Carol Lundgren— the chauffeur of Arthur Gwynn Geiger, the rare book dealer who is blackmailing Philip Marlowe's client, General Sternwood— preparing to shoot the gambler Joe Brody outside Brody’s apartment.

ART BY DIRECTORS - Part Three

PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS AND STORYBOARDS BY EIGHT FILM DIRECTORS

Written by Karl French
Published in GRANTA magazine #86

 

John Huston (1906-1987)

Before his directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon (1941), the film that confirmed Humphrey Bogart as a tough-guy star; Huston had been making a good living as a screenwriter; notably for Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra (1941) and Howard Hawks’s Sergeant York (1941); later he would script Orson Welles’s post-war thriller The Stranger (1946). The collaboration with Bogart was the most important in Huston’s long career, and together they would turn out The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), Key Largo (1948), The African Queen (1951), and the underrated oddity Beat the Devil (1953).
    Although the 1960s began well with The Misfits (1961), the pessimism of the film was appropriate, with its three stars (Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe and Montgomery Clift) all close to death and its director set for a dismal run throughout the decade. His career was reborn with Fat City (1972), and remained on a reasonably even keel (the notable low point, in 1981, of Escape to Victory notwithstanding) for the rest of his life.
    But things could have been very different. After a serious illness as a ten year old, he was all but bedridden for several years. He emerged with a determination to live an intellectually and physically full life. At fifteen he was introduced to the sport of boxing for which he shared a passion with his father, the actor Walter Huston, who would later co-star in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Soon afterwards Huston developed an equally strong passion for painting. ‘Nothing,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘has played a more important role in my life.’
    He was fascinated by the Cubists, and by the American school of Synchronism. He enrolled in the Smith School of Art in Los Angeles but was soon disillusioned with the aridity of the teaching and what he saw as the pointless discipline of the life classes there. Within months he had dropped out of art school and fallen in with a group of like-minded artists in the Art Students League. He continued to paint throughout his life. Huston had studios in each of his homes, notably St Clerans in Galway, Ireland, a house that also contained much of his art collection, ranging from Paul Klee paintings to his impressive hoard of Pre-Columbian art.

'The Spirit of St.Clerans' (1960s)

Extracts from John Huston's sketchbook, 1956, the year he was making 'Moby Dick' (pen on paper)

Extracts from John Huston's sketchbook, 1956, the year he was making 'Moby Dick' (pencil on paper)

Extracts from John Huston's sketchbook, 1956, the year he was making 'Moby Dick' (pencil and coloured pencil on paper)

Martin Scorsese (b. 1942)

Scorsese’s twin passions as a child and adolescent were the cinema and the Church and for many years he planned to enter the priesthood. But the movies won out and he studied film at New York University, where by the time he graduated he had made a number of short films. Through the 1960s he worked as an editor and also directed his first feature film, Who’s That Knocking on My Door? (1968), a labour of love starring Harvey Keitel, who would become, along with Robert De Niro, one of Scorsese’s favourite actors.
    He got his big break, as did Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovitch, under Roger Corman, who assigned him to direct Boxcar Bertha (1972). The film was a modest success, but a key moment came when Scorsese screened it for his idol, John Cassavetes, who praised the style but pleaded with Scorsese to go for more personal material. Heeding that advice, Scorsese dusted off an old idea of his based around the characters who had populated his own neighbourhood of Little Italy, in downtown Manhattan, in his youth. Mean Streets, released in 1973, co-starring De Niro and Keitel, made Scorsese’s reputation and established his trademark themes—men, often violent men in crisis, with religion generally in the background or foreground—and a signature directorial style, involving flashy, imaginative visual flourishes, long or otherwise complex takes, and pervasive pop music on the soundtrack.
    While occasionally working on more mainstream material, Scorsese turned out a succession of great films, including Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983), and Goodfellas (1990), all of which bear his personal touch. Many have been script collaborations—Scorsese and Nick Pileggi co-wrote Goodfellas and Casino (1995)—or written wholly by others, most notably Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver.
    Throughout his career Scorsese has carefully storyboarded his own films. With their urgent, primitive stylelessness, these 'storyboards may stretch the definition of art; indeed they may look uncomfortably like extracts from (Taxi Driver’s) Travis Bickle’s illustrated notebooks. But they show Scorsese’s innate understanding of the medium and his talent for framing shots and building sequences—in the examples featured here, sequences that have been etched forever into the minds of a generation of film-goers.

Storyboards for one of the fight sequences in 'Raging Bull' (1980)

Some of Scorsese's storyboards for 'Taxi Driver' (1976)

ART BY DIRECTORS - Part Two

PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS AND STORYBOARDS BY EIGHT FILM DIRECTORS

Written by Karl French
Published in GRANTA magazine #86

 

Mike Figgis (b. 1949)

Mike Figgis has been taking photographs for more than four decades, a passion made all the stronger by the possibilities of digital photography. As well as being an obsessive note-taker and filer of his notebooks, sketches and other art works, Figgis takes his camera everywhere he goes. The result, aside from serving as an alternative diary, is an exceptional body of work. He spent much of his early childhood in Kenya, returning to north-east England at the age of ten. The upper-class accent he had picked up in colonial Africa set him apart from his peers and he sought refuge in, among other things, photography. Around the same time he fell in love with music—jazz, blues, and rock and roll—and began to play trumpet and guitar. Rejected by the National Film School, in the 1970s Figgis joined the People Show, an avant-garde musical theatre group with which he stayed for more than a decade and where he was able to write, direct, act, compose and perform. Also during this time he played with a number of jazz bands. In 1980 he formed the Mike Figgis Group, and staged various theatrical shows relying heavily on music that he composed and film footage that he directed.
    Figgis made his debut in 1988 with Stormy Monday, a stylish, Newcastle-set neo-noir which showed a sureness of touch both in the film’s visual style and his ability to handle a star cast. His first Hollywood film, Internal Affairs (1990), again proved his talent for handling actors, drawing from Richard Gere possibly his finest and certainly his most unsettling performance. The next three films suggested he was still struggling to fit his talent for erotically charged examinations of the human psyche into Hollywood-style moviemaking. Liebestraum (1991) was a low-key thriller, Mr Jones (1993) a disappointing reunion with Gere, The Browning Version (1994) a rather straightforward Rattigan adaptation. But for his next film Figgis stripped the budget to a minimum and shot on 16mm. The result was Leaving Las Vegas (1995), the masterpiece of his career so far, with fine performances from Nicolas Cage as the doomed hero and Elizabeth Shue as his hapless lover.
    From then on, Figgis has become ever more experimental, with the dazzling split-screen experiment of Timecode (2000), and Hotel (2001) both exploiting the potential of digital video technology.

Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers arresting suspects, Los Angeles, 1990s

Pen sketch of a friend, Steven, dying from Aids at the Middlesex Hospital, London (1992)

Figgis's mother at his father's funeral (1976)

Satyajit Ray (1921-1992)

As his friend Kurosawa had done for Japanese cinema, so Satyajit Ray was responsible for establishing an international interest in Indian cinema in the 1950s. He achieved this with his serene, wise and assured debut Father Panchali (1955) which, alongside Aparajito (1956) and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959), became known as the Apu Trilogy—one of the greatest works in world cinema. Again like Kurosawa, in childhood Ray had seemed destined to become a professional artist. He received years of training and achieved some success as an illustrator.
    He was born into a well-off Bengali family in Calcutta, and in 1940 he bowed to his family’s wishes and agreed to attend Shantiniketan, the university run by Rabindranath Tagore, who would inspire Ray throughout his career: he adapted several of Tagore’s stories for the cinema and produced a documentary to mark the centenary of Tagore’s birth.
    At Shantiniketan, Ray was introduced to Eastern art—Japanese and Chinese as well as Indian. He enhanced his studies by travelling through the country, scrutinizing and sketching traditional Indian sculptures, statues and shrines. He also visited nearby villages to make sketches. This introduced Ray to the humble ways of life that he would explore in his first films.
    After university, Ray returned to Calcutta in 1942 and joined a British-owned advertising company. During the next decade (which included a six-month stay in London where he furthered his cinematic education), Ray worked regularly as a freelance illustrator, designing book jackets and posters. He was also a film critic, which is how he came to meet his idol Jean Renoir. He had dreamed since childhood of breaking into movies, and it was while working on the designs for a new edition of Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novel Pather Panchali that he became passionate about making it into a film, which he did, coming close to bankruptcy in the process. As his fame grew—and he continued to direct films up to the late 1980s—Ray would still draw illustrations, regularly providing the covers for the children’s magazine Sandesh that had been launched by his father.

A watercolour from 1942, after the Japanese master, Ogata Korin (1658-1716)

Ray's wash-sketches for his first film 'Pather Panchali' (1955)

Ray's woodcut illustration for a 1944 edition of 'Pather Panchali' by Bibhuti Bhusan Bandhopadhyay, the novel on which the film was based

Peter Greenaway (b. 1942)

Greenaway grew up in Wanstead, east London, and after Forest Hills, a minor public school in Essex, went to Walthamstow Art School, which he later described as ‘a breath of fresh air—the novelty value lasted for years, and there I tried to make some sense of an accidental discovery—Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). That film changed everything.’ The other seminal film in his development as a director was Alan Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and if Greenaway fits into any tradition it is that of the 1960s European auteurs, Bergman, Resnais, Godard, through whose work he gained his education in cinema.
    This education continued through the 1960s, when he found work at the British Film Institute (BFI) and then at the Central Office of Information, where he picked up experience in film-editing. For years he made small, self-financed, experimental films, until the critical success of The Falls, in 1980, led to The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), the film that most obviously owes a debt to Resnais. With his template established, he continued to turn out playful, obscure, erudite, and always controversial films at the rate of roughly one every two years.
    The central tension in his films is between the human capacity for, and attraction towards, chaos, ugliness and violence, and the ability or desire to impose order on the world through elaborate taxonomy or game-playing. His films are filled with arcane jokes and references and are often broken down into discrete segments—sometimes numbered, as with the dark and and ludic Drowning by Numbers (1988), or colour-coded, as in the case of his gross-out masterpiece, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989). So while his films all contain sex, death, decay, violence, and characters who are either ciphers or loathsome and sometimes both, this is all set within a meticulously realized structure containing a sense of order and attention to detail that is equally crucial to his paintings, sketches and 3-D assemblages. The actor Tim Roth summed up Greenaway’s obsessiveness when he said, only half-jokingly, that during the making of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover the only significant direction he received was to move a couple of inches this way or that to restore the essential symmetry of the composition.

 

'Gaming Board', 1968 (oil on wood)

'Icarus Falling into Water', 1997 (mixed media on card)

'The Frames', 1981 (mixed media on card)

ART BY DIRECTORS - Part One

PAINTINGS, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS AND STORYBOARDS BY EIGHT FILM DIRECTORS

Written by Karl French
Published in GRANTA magazine #86

 

Akira Kurosawa (1910-1998)

As a child, Kurosawa dreamed of becoming an artist. He was encouraged in this by his primary school teacher and, to a degree, by his father, who insisted he complement his artistic education with a course in calligraphy. On leaving school at eighteen, one of his paintings was accepted for the Nika exhibition, a prestigious annual art festival, but he failed to take his formal training any further.
    In an interview towards the end of his life, Kurosawa was asked why he hadn’t become a painter. He replied: ‘Because I failed the exam.’ Again at his father’s insistence he had applied to a famous art school but had been rejected. After this he educated himself, visiting art galleries and studying individual painters. He persevered for a few more years, taking commissions from popular magazines. Then, at the age of twenty-five, having never contemplated a career in films, he answered an advertisement from Photo-Chemical Laboratories seeking trainee assistant directors. He was accepted and began an apprenticeship with the established director Kajiro Yamamoto. He directed his first film, Sansbiro Sugata, in 1943.
    Kurosawa was, like his friend Satyajit Ray, fundamentally a humanist film-maker, but he was also a great visual stylist. His films are marked by a painterly quality and he had an unmatched talent for staging fights and action set-pieces. His work is marked as much by Western as by Eastern influences, so it is fitting that his films should have been reappropriated by Hollywood and European directors: his samurai movies, including Seven Samurai (1954), provided the source material for Sergio Leone’s Dollars cycle and John Sturges’s The Magnificent Seven, among others.
    Shortly after the release of his first colour film, Dodes’Kaden (1970), Kurosawa attempted suicide. He recovered to make three further masterpieces, Dersu Uzala (1975), Kagemusha (1980) and Ran (1985), which was helped financially by the intervention of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. It was in the long preproduction periods on these last films that he made detailed preparatory sketches in his trademark style—which owed a clear debt to Van Gogh and the Impressionists. His passion for Van Gogh was particularly evident in his penultimate film, Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990), in which the elderly director meets Vincent, played by Kurosawa-worshipper Martin Scorsese.

A sketch for 'Akira Kurosawa's Dreams' (1990), in which Martin Scorsese plays Vincent Van Gogh

Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980)

First inspired by German Expressionist cinema, Hitchcock quickly developed his signature style of suspense film-making. His films returned again and again to the same psychological territory—fear of authority figures, overbearing mothers, false accusations (with innocent men drawn into desperate situations by malign fate)—and incorporated elaborately staged set-pieces and extended takes. They also included his own often cheeky cameo appearances.
    For all his willingness to discuss his technique and philosophy of the craft of movie direction at great length, like some populist Eisenstein, he professed (as would Woody Allen decades later) a distaste for the actual process of film-making. Allen attributed his own feelings to a discomfort in dealing with actors and continual disappointment in the results compared to the image he had of the film in his head. Hitchcock felt, or claimed to feel, that rendering the action on celluloid was almost redundant, since he had already created the films in the elaborate storyboarding sessions that preceded each production. Although he usually employed a professional storyboard artist, and when he contributed his own sketches they tended to be hastily prepared and very rough, Hitchcock was a gifted draughtsman and, as his preparatory sketches for The 39 Steps (1935) show, he could produce atmospheric work of high quality.
    He left school in his early teens and went to work for the Henley Telegraph and Cable Company. He also took night classes in life drawing at the University of London and received a rudimentary education in the history of black-and-white illustration. When this came to the attention of his employers he was moved to the advertising department, where he churned out images over the next few years. In 1920 the American company Famous Players-Lasky opened a film studio in north London and Hitchcock went to work there, initially unpaid, supplying title cards for silent films. He was eventually made head of titles. He directed his first film, The Pleasure Garden, in 1925, and over the next fifty years an extraordinary run of suspense masterpieces followed, including The 39 Steps (1935), Notorious (1946), Strangers on a Train (1951), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960).

Janet Leigh in the shower sequence from 'Psycho' (1960)

Some of the few preparatory drawings for "The 39 Steps" (1935)

Some of the few preparatory drawings for "The 39 Steps" (1935)

Some of the few preparatory drawings for "The 39 Steps" (1935)

Some of the few preparatory drawings for "The 39 Steps" (1935)

Takeshi Kitano (b. 1947)

After what seems to have been a miserable childhood, in which he and his siblings were subject to their father’s violent outbursts (his father would later be the basis for the central character in his 1999 film, Kikujiro) Kitano dropped out of university and became apprenticed to a comedian. He joined up with Jiro, another young stand-up comic; they styled themselves ‘The Two Beats’ (hence Kitano’s stage name, Beat Takeshi, which he still uses as an actor) and became a cult success in Japan with their outrageous, often obscene stage act which in time they brought to television.
    In 1982, the director Nagisa Oshima cast Kitano against type as the brutal Hara in Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. In Japan his fame as a comic affected him adversely, with audiences reputedly hooting with laughter at his every appearance on screen, despite the violence of his character. His next sideways move was equally dramatic, when he emerged as a gifted director on his first film, Violent Cop (1989).
It was an accident which led Kitano to take up painting. On the night of August 2,1994, after finishing his role in Johnny Mnemonic, he had a few drinks and went for a ride on his new motorbike. He crashed, fracturing his skull and cheekbone. He admitted later he wasn’t sure where he was going that night, or even whether or not it had been a suicide attempt. ‘I even thought my brain structure might have been changed and that it might make me more artistic,’ he said later. ‘It even convinced me to start painting.’
    He made a successful return to film-making with Kids Return (1996), but his masterpiece came in 1997 with Hana-Bi, in which he also plays the leading role as Nishi, a retired cop who alternates between acts of casual but extreme violence and tenderness in caring for his sick wife. Kitano had been planning this film before his accident, but his brush with death clearly informs its mood. Many of the paintings he made during his convalescence are woven seamlessly into the film, presented as the art work created by Nishi’s wheelchair-bound former partner Horibe. There is something perfect about these dreamy images in which flowers meld with animals, dovetailing with the film’s emblematic title, which consists of the Japanese word for fireworks broken down into its constituent parts: hana (flower), bi (fire).

Kitano painting which feature in his film "Hana-Bi" (1997)

Kitano painting which feature in his film "Hana-Bi" (1997)

A cartoon angel which appeared in Kitano's 1999 film "Kikujiro".

Kitano's failed attempt to copy Van Gogh's "Sunflowers", which he turned into a visual joke.

Another painting used in "Hana-Bi". The snow is made of thousands of copies of the Chinese pictogram for snow;the symbol at the centre means suicide.

Un tratamiento a cuatro cuadros. Entrevista con Mike Figgis

A juzgar por su apariencia bohemia, uno pensaría que Figgis es un chaman, un profesor universitario o, mas acorde con sus verdaderas habilidades, un jazzista. De hecho, en tanto director y compositor consumado, Figgis a menudo ha tornado el camino menos transitado componiendo la música de sus películas. Y mucho antes de que Adiós a Las Vegas (1995) lo convirtiera en un director ingles con éxito en Hollywood, Figgis estuvo experimentando con producciones multimedia que combinaban acción viva con música y cine.
Time Code, su primera película en video digital lo hizo volver a esas raíces. Filmada en tiempo real con cuatro cámaras Sony DSR-1 (adaptadas a sus necesidades) durante 93 minutos de manera ininterrumpida (la duración de la cinta digital), es un audaz experimento que aborda la película como si fuera una compleja composición orquestal. Mientras improvisaban sus diálogos, los actores principales utilizaron relojes sincronizados para ver donde estaban en el desarrollo de la historia, el cual Figgis había planeado y registrado de manera meticulosa en hojas para partitura.

¿No se corre el riesgo de fomentar cierta falta de cualidades artísticas al recomendar a los realizadores que trabajan con video digital que se sientan con la libertad de experimentar en todo sentido?

Sin duda, estan por hacerse miles de peliculas de calidad inferior que puede que encuentren o no un mercado. Algunas realmente malas, meramente comerciales y burdas se volveran grandes exitos. Y las obras geniales seran ignoradas. Pero eso pasa en cualquier medio.
A mi simplemente me gusta la idea de que, asi como cualquiera puede escribir un libro si tiene lapiz y papel, ahora todo mundo puede hacer una pelicula. Esto abre posibilidades de un medio menos elitista y menos basado en la tecnologia.

Dices que no tienes muchas ganas de hacer otra película en 35mm. Me imagino que es menos por la imagen que por el proceso.

Adquiri mi propia Super 16 Aaton y puedo usarla en combinación con un enfoque digital. Me he hecho de un par de camaras digitales con las que me siento muy feliz. De modo que ahora tengo herramientas suficientes para decidir como filmar. Me encanta el cine. Me gusta el celuloide. Pero el Super 16 me funciona perfectamente. De hecho prefiero la estetica del 16mm a la del 35mm. Te da una imagen con una apariencia un poco menos fina, menos nitida, mas impresionista. Ahora el 35mm me parece demasiado clinico; en realidad tiene la apariencia del video de alta definition. Siento que es como si hubiera una correspondencia entre ellos.

¿Podrías haber hecho Adiós a Las Vegas en video digital?

En este momento, de haber tenido las camaras con las que filme Time Code, lo habria pensado. Adios a Las Vegas fue un proyecto tan dificil en cuanto al presupuesto, que cualquier forma de bajar el presupuesto sin perder calidad me habria interesado. Pero creo que el Super 16 fue perfecto para la pelicula.

¿Por que decidiste hacer Time Code en video digital?

Siempre ha sido una fantasia de muchos cineastas filmar en tiempo real, sin cortes. Antes uno estaba limitado por la duracion del rollo. Ahora por primera vez es posible rodar una pelicula durante 90 minutos sin un solo corte. Empece a jugar con la idea en mi cuaderno de notas. Uno de los problemas es que si filmas una pelicula de 90 minutos con una sola camara, estas restringido al hecho de que la camara solo puede estar en un sitio a la vez. Desde Iuego, lo grandioso del cine convencional es que la edicion te permite cortar cuando quieras y en cualquier lugar. Asi que pense que la unica manera de conseguir ese efecto era tener un formato de varias pantallas.
Dado que la necesidad es la madre de la inventiva, comence a hacer diagramas y se me ocurrio la idea de filmar con cuatro camaras y tener en pantalla cuatro acciones paralelas que presentaran todas las facetas de una misma historia. Me senti sumamente entusiasmado cuando pense que, por lo menos tecnicamente, era perfectamente posible.
Lo mas complicado era la regrabacion. Era verdaderamente dificil, pues para ello tenia que tomar decisiones acerca del dialogo de las diversas pantallas. No fue facil. Si en las cuatro pantallas tienes mas de diez personas, digamos, hablando todo el tiempo, simplemente enajenas al publico y no es posible escuchar claramente lo que estan diciendo. Si, por otra parte, subes un poco uno de los dialogos y estas usando las bocinas ambientales y ecualizas todas las voces de manera un poco distinta, encuentras que puedes dife- renciar lo que esta diciendo la gente, como si estuvieras en el vestibulo de un hotel. Pero tienes que orientar sutilmen- te el ojo, sin que sea obvio, mediante un enfoque muy sofisticado del audio, procedimiento que se acerca mucho a como es en la realidad.

¿De que te serviste para ayudar a los adores a aceptar el reto?

Sin duda lo que mas sirvió fueron las ventajas tecnológicas. Si grabas en video y estas filmando 93 minutos en tiempo real y comienzas en la mañana, para el almuerzo ya terminaste, y el técnico de video inmediatamente hace cuatro copias, transfiriendo con un aumento de la calidad de la cámara digital a DigiBeta con el mismo código de tiempo. Entonces reproduces las cuatro cintas en cuatro monitores dispuestos a diferentes alturas en un cuadrante, con cuatro salidas hacia una mezcladora. Lo importante para ellos era ver la dinámica en la que participaban, el verse en contexto. Si un actor realmente se esta pasando de la raya -pues todos están improvisando ?%94 y esta siendo egocéntrico, no hay nada mas contundente que verte frente a los otros 27 actores sentados juntos. Yo no podría decir nada a un actor que tuviera la misma fuerza ni el mismo efecto que el hecho de que ellos vean lo que están haciendo. Nos sentamos en circulo y los invite a todos a hacer comentarios. Yo puedo decir: «Bien, esto es lo que yo creo: funciona, pero en el minuto 1:43 se traslapan sus diálogos, de modo que tenemos que reorganizar un poco la secuencia.

¿El titulo de Time Code alude sobre todo a ese proceso?

Si, este film se basa completamente en la tecnología del código de tiempo. Usamos micrófonos de radio de veintisiete canales, además de los micrófonos de las cámaras y los que fueron instalados, pues no había posibilidad de usar canas en ninguna parte porque estábamos usando cuatro cámaras. Por tanto tenia que hacerse que la imagen y el sonido casaran por algún medio, y para ello utilizamos el código de tiempo. Pienso que en todo caso es una frase provocativa.

Como compositor, prestas mas atención a la musicalización que la mayoría de los directores. ¿Hizo alguna diferencia tu enfoque musical en este proyecto particular?

Una diferencia muy interesante, pues no solo permitió que los actores abordaran su ejercicio actoral sobre una base diaria, sino que, como estuve realizando cada noche estas mezclas en vivo, también introduje un gran numero de CDs y probé diferentes maneras de abordar la música. Esto fue inspirando cotidianamente su actuación. Por ejemplo, utilice algunas piezas de música de cuerdas realmente lentas y con cierta fuerza, y los actores comenzaron a ajustar su estilo a sabiendas de que esa era la forma en que se iba a desarrollar la escena y así era como podría salir con la mezcla final. Se volvió una especie de ejecución a dos manos entre los actores y la música. Lo cual también es interesante si luego cambias de opinión, pues puedes ir contra esa tendencia con la música, cosa que he hecho en un par de casos.
De igual modo, la manera en que se escribió el film en tanto historia es realmente como una composición musical en papel pautado. Cada una de las cuatro cámaras tiene un pentagrama musical y cada barra representaba un minuto, de modo que todo el film fue planeado en cierto sentido como si fuera un cuarteto de cuerdas. Debido a mi formación musical, esa fue la única manera en que pude registrar la operación de las cuatro cámaras.

¿Has pensado en integrar la red al proceso de desarrollo de una película?

Lo he pensado, pero tengo la teoría de que la red es una especie de renacimiento de la literatura y la palabra escrita. En realidad yo me siento feliz con una pluma fuente y un cuaderno, y la red es una forma de hablar e intercambiar ideas e investigar. Para mi Internet es en cierto modo algo pavoroso: demasiadas posibilidades, demasiadas opciones.

¿Alguna idea de que viene después de Time Code?

Solo quiero ir a la cama y dormir durante un año

 

 

Entrevista realizada por Marco Masoni en Febrero del 2001.

Entrevista a Isaki Lacuesta por Jorge Carrión

Jorge Carrión: Tu cine puede ser leído, tras Godard o Marker, como una poética de la cita...

Isaki Lacuesta: Las casas de citas son lugares de reputación dudosa, así que prometo que mis próximas películas evitarán incidir en esa poética que señalas, que me parece bastante peligrosa, al menos para mí. A partir de ahora me gustaría que mis películas siguieran caminos muy distintos: por un lado, trabajo con una serie de guiones más narrativos, y por el otro, en piezas más autobiográficas, cercanas al cuaderno de notas.

Jorge Carrión:  También cultivas la cita literaria: ¿Cómo sintetizarías tu trayectoria como lector de libros?

Isaki Lacuesta: No sabría sintetizarla bien. Creo que hay un relato de Luis Landero en el que resume la historia de la literatura universal en menos de diez líneas. Yo sería incapaz de hacer algo semejante, parecería una guía telefónica para pedantes. Si quieres un resumen, puedo decirte que fui un niño que leía mucho y hablaba poco. A partir de los dieciocho comencé a publicar reseñas literarias en un periódico de provincias, gracias a lo cual me regalaban muchos libros, la mayoría de los cuales eran pésimos, pero entre ellos siempre aparecía alguna joya para mí desconocida, como Joseph Joubert o Madame de Sevigné. Pasé por las etapas previsibles en cualquier letraherido (Shakespeare, Kafka y Borges, todos ellos autores que me parecen mucho más complicados ahora que entonces, la Lost Generation norteamericana, los franceses decimonónicos, De Quincey, Diderot, Villon, Virgina Woolf, los gigantes rusos, los dadaístas, surrealistas y  otros “–istas” menos afamados, los trágicos griegos, Sterne, Pessoa y compañía...), y hace unos años, la lectura de Proust me conmocionó y supuso un punto de inflexión. Tras la resaca de La recherche, volví a los viejos conocidos, y lo que más leo ahora son dietarios de artistas y novelas de aventuras. Digamos que ando a medias entre Conrad y Valéry. Para terminar el resumen, ahora, por culpa de la moda de las conferencias, los cursos y las mesas redondas, me pagan más por hablar que por leer, todo lo cual ha trastocado mi naturaleza. Ahora leo menos y hablo demasiado.

Jorge Carrión: En Las variaciones Marker hay una clara disociación entre la voz en off y las imágenes que se proyectan. Me refiero a una disociación referencial, evidentemente sí hay una asociación metafórica, poética. ¿Cómo has llegado a esos vínculos simbólicos? ¿Exclusivamente desde el cine? ¿A través de la literatura, de la poesía?

Isaki Lacuesta: Normalmente, estas disociaciones surgen durante el trabajo de montaje, nunca aparecen antes del contacto directo con las imágenes y los sonidos. En este aspecto son más fruto de la artesanía y el jugueteo con los materiales que de un plan preconcebido. Con el montador Sergi Dies nos gusta mucho hacer manualidades con los planos antes de empezar a pensar demasiado, porque las personas somos animales dotados de una increíble capacidad fabuladora, y a la que juntamos o aproximamos dos elementos dispares no podemos evitar percibir vínculos entre ellos, y comenzar a inventarnos historias o metáforas. De hecho, cada pieza de Las Variaciones tiene un estilo de montaje distinto. Y si me preguntas por mi formación, imagino que en este gusto por el montaje han influido mucho la música y la literatura. Crecí escuchando The Beatles mientras leía a Mary Shelley, Stevenson y Bram Stoker. Ahora, cuando escucho algunas de aquellas canciones que marcaron mi infancia no puedo dejar de asociarlas a determinadas páginas de Frankenstein, algo que desde luego nunca pudieron prever ni Lennon ni Shelley.

Jorge Carrión:En la película hablas de la relación entre montaje y pestañeo. ¿Cuál es el ritmo (musical) de la mirada? ¿Cómo se relaciona con el del pensamiento?

Isaki Lacuesta: Los cineastas clásicos de Hollywood aspiraban a lograr un montaje invisible, en el que cada plano durara exactamente el tiempo justo que el espectador requería para su comprensión. Siguiendo esta idea, el gran montador Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, etc) apuntaba que los parpadeos deberían caer siempre en el momento preciso del corte, de tal modo que nunca pudiéramos apreciarlos. Lo que nosotros decimos en “Las Variaciones” es que Chris Marker parte de una concepción opuesta del arte del montaje, en la que el corte debe poder ser visto y pensado, puesto que cada cambio de plano, cada intersticio, está repleto de significado. Por eso los parpadeos jamás coinciden con el instante del corte y del empalme. En cuanto a la musicalidad de la mirada, cada día admiro más a los cineastas que son capaces de plasmar un cambio de ritmo, una alteración del estado de ánimo, de dilatar la temporalidad de un puñetazo hasta que podamos apreciar que en ese gesto brusco se escondía una caricia: eso podemos encontrarlo claramente en secuencias como éstas: de Mauvais sang , Days of being wild o en el germen de las anteriores: Masculin féminin.

Jorge Carrión: Está claro que el viaje es para ti un modo de llegar a las historias y, sobre todo, a ciertas imágenes. En Las variaciones hablas de la oposición porteña entre Piglia y Aira y la asocias a luchadores de sumo. ¿Por qué?

Isaki Lacuesta: Para mí, el viaje es, antes que nada, una forma de vivir. Otra cuestión es hasta qué punto los que hemos crecido educados por el cine y la literatura en vez de por la religión, podemos vivir sin dejar de vernos a nosotros mismos como los protagonistas y al mismo tiempo los lectores del relato de nuestra propia vida. Por cuestiones laborales, cada vez viajo más y leo menos. Además, hoy en día los cineastas viajamos todo el rato y al azar, y acabamos yendo allí donde nos invitan, como si fuéramos viajantes. Para ser más precisos: somos como cantantes de rock que en vez de tocar en los conciertos, se limitaran a pinchar sus discos y a explicarlos después en un coloquio por si alguien tuviera problemas de oído o no los hubiera podido entender del todo bien. Somos buhoneros. En fin, es una costumbre muy extraña, pero gracias a eso he podido conocer lugares que nunca hubiera imaginado visitar. Gracias a esta red mundial de festivales, Buenos Aires se ha convertido en una de las ciudades que más han marcado los últimos cinco años de mi vida. La adoro y la detesto. Siento que los porteños tienen la necesidad de extremar siempre sus opiniones y partir el mundo en dos bandos opuestos. El chiste acerca de Piglia y Aira surgía de esta idea, y de la admiración que siento por ambos, aunque al parecer ellos se odien entre sí. Como decía Borges sobre los peronistas, “no son ni buenos ni malos, son incorregibles”.

Jorge Carrión: En la estructura literaria del guión de Las variaciones, con su gusto por la coincidencia y por las historias paralelas, adivino la lectura de Enrique Vila-Matas. ¿Estoy en lo cierto?

Isaki Lacuesta: No pensé en Vila-Matas cuando lo escribía, pero en cualquier caso, lo cierto es que he leído casi todos sus libros, así que bien podría ser que hubiera un rastro suyo. Creo que muchos lectores de nuestra generación encontramos a Vila-Matas en el momento justo para que nos descubriera a la cofradía de los raros: Walser, Perec, Artaud, Musil, Polgar, Aira y compañía. En este aspecto, Vila-Matas ha hecho un trabajo similar al de Gómez de la Serna en su día. Para cerrar el círculo, hace poco interpreté en un corto a la sombra de Vila-Matas, y él me incorporó a una de sus crónicas.Estos juegos borgianos me siguen divirtiendo mucho, pero de todos modos,  cada vez siento más que estamos rodeados de un exceso de metacine y metaliteratura, y procuro esquivarlo como puedo, intentando volcarme en la vida sin encuadres ni encuadernaciones. El arte puede ayudarnos a ahondar en las experiencias, pero al mismo tiempo puede interponerse como un filtro, y eso es lo que más temo: no me gustaría nada acabar en la cama con Anna Karenina.

Jorge Carrión: Me interesa mucho esa idea: después de la posmodernidad, volvemos a la vida, sin inocencia, post-irónicos quizá; lo real, entonces, se vuelve en la raíz (lo radical) del arte. En ese sentido, La leyenda del tiempo es una película que hace malabarismos con la realidad, y que busca en ella la emoción, la piel, el paisaje, la belleza, la tristeza…

Isaki Lacuesta: Después de Cravan, que es una película de aprendizaje,  de carácter más teórico, necesitaba tratar de captar este tipo de impresiones más inmediatas, que de algún modo ahora me parecen más cercanas a la esencia del cine, entendido como un arte de las huellas y los rastros. Me apetecía abordar el cine como retrato. En fin, estoy completamente de acuerdo con la idea que apuntas.

Jorge Carrión: Hace años entrevisté a Guerin y me hizo una reflexión parecida: el cine como arte del rastreo (y de la luz). Compartes con él el interés por lo real, la búsqueda de la perfección o de la maestría técnica y una profunda conciencia literaria, además de una escena del cine español del siglo XXI, la que se ha desarrollado en sintonía con el Máster de Cine Documental de la UPF y con el suplemento Cultura/s de La Vanguardia, es decir, con Jordi Balló, que ha contado con Joaquín Jordá y con José Luis Guerin como tutores...

Isaki Lacuesta: El encargo del cazador de Jordà y Tren de sombras de Guerin me marcaron mucho cuando empecé a plantearme hacer películas, son obras que me descubrieron que era posible hacer cine de formas distintas a la habitual. Después, tuve el gusto de conocerles y entablar amistad con ambos. Ese diálogo intergeneracional me parece importante, porque ha sido algo poco habitual en la historia del cine español. Sin embargo, debo aclarar que la búsqueda de la perfección no es algo que me quite el sueño: la mayoría de mis películas favoritas como espectador son bastante frágiles e irregulares. Pretender hacer películas perfectas sólo puede conducirte a la impostura o la parálisis: si los ángeles vuelan es porque se lo toman a la ligera. Y yo quiero hacer películas sin paracaídas.

Jorge Carrión: Tu cine busca la armonía y la disonancia, artesanales, entre imagen, texto y música. ¿Es válida todavía la vieja pretensión del cine como arte total?

Isaki Lacuesta: En castellano, “total...”, seguido de puntos suspensivos, viene a significar “qué más dará, total, pa lo qué importa...”. Me parece que ésa es la acepción de la palabra más reivindicable.

Jorge Carrión: En tus trabajos en el ámbito del arte contemporáneo estás investigando con las nuevas tecnologías. Tienes un proyecto sobre escáner cerebral (vinculado con un neorromanticismo: escanean el cerebro de tu pareja sentimental y tú buscas, mediante palabras clave, que son ciudades donde estuvisteis juntos, el rastro del amor neuronal) y otro en marcha sobre Google Earth. ¿El cine sólo puede sobrevivir en diálogo con el porvenir?

Isaki Lacuesta: El cine tiene la capacidad de convertir en pasado todo lo que toca, en un falso eterno presente o pretérito indefinido como el de Pompeya, por eso ahora echo de menos un cine más volcado en el presente, y a menudo me pregunto cómo puede conjugarse con la imagen cinematográfica en futuro (de ahí mi interés por Chris Marker). El trabajo al que haces referencia se titula “Lugares que no existen- Goggle Earth” y es una réplica a ras de suelo del famoso programa, que estamos realizando con Isa Campo. “Goggle” (con dos “g en medio”) significa “remover los ojos” y “anteojeras”. Hemos sabido que Google (con dos “o”) oculta deliberadamente distintos paisajes, y nosotros vamos a ir allí para filmar lo que existe debajo de esos falsos paisajes de píxels que vemos en el ordenador.  Por ejemplo, ya hemos filmado un hotel de lujo construido en Fuerteventura incumpliendo la ley de costas, y que Google optó por ocultar y convertirlo en una playa después de pactar con el ayuntamiento del lugar. En los próximos meses, vamos a hacer lo mismo en espacios de Cádiz, Colombia, Melbourne, Ecuador, Rusia... Hay un lugar común que nos parece terrible, según el cual viajar hoy en día ya no tiene sentido, porque todos nos hemos convertido en turistas que nos desplazamos por lugares homogeneizados. Creemos que ver las cosas con nuestros propios ojos aún tiene sentido, y nos gusta recuperar el pasaje del gran Conrad: “De muchacho tenía yo pasión por los mapas. Hubiera mirado durante horas enteras mapas de América del sur, de África, de Australia, y me hubiera perdido en todas las glorias de la exploración. En aquel tiempo, había en la tierra mucho espacio en blanco, y cuando yo veía en un mapa uno que parecía especialmente atractivo, hubiera puesto mi dedo sobre él: “cuando crezca iré allá". El mundo sigue lleno de espacios en blanco, incluso en Google Earth.

Jorge Carrión: Acabo de publicar un libro sobre Australia: en ese viaje y en su escritura he descubierto precisamente eso, que tiene sentido irte a la otra punta del mundo, porque Wikipedia, Google o las páginas web de los pueblos y oficinas de turismo están llenos de vacíos, de mentiras, de malentendidos. El viaje, de algún modo, se vuelve todavía más necesario: porque antes los espacios estaban en blanco, eran honestos; ahora están falsamente llenos, están enmascarados, de modo que el viajero tiene que borrar antes de escribir en ellos. Tu video sobre el cerebro, de algún modo, apunta hacia una dirección complementaria: qué hay escrito dentro de nosotros, cómo podemos mapearnos…

Isaki Lacuesta: En realidad, me parece que tanto “Lugares que no existen (Goggle Earth)” como “Resonancias magnéticas” plantean una lectura ambivalente. Sentimos una necesidad irrefrenable de escritura, de cartografiar el mundo entero e incluso nuestras emociones, pero al mismo tiempo la gracia de estos intentos radica en su absoluta imposibilidad. En “Resonancias” jugaba con la fantasía de poder penetrar en la mente y en los sentimientos de mi amada. Esta idea, propia de la ciencia ficción, es la misma que Michaux ya soñó hace décadas: "Este fantasma, este doble que es el temperamento y sus recorridos extraños denominados sentimientos, que en la fisonomía sólo afloran y en los actos se imprimen, cualquier día, cualquier día estoy seguro y no tan lejano y felices aquellos que los contemplarán, cualquier día se les verá. Se verá, gracias a un invento cualquiera, los sentimientos, formarse las emociones, enlazarse, y sus conexiones progresivamente hasta contagiar el individuo todo entero. Se verá el amor". (Henri Michaux, "Pensando en el fenómeno de la pintura", 1946). En “Resonancias”, los científicos que contraté para analizar el cerebro de mi amada concluyeron que creían haber detectado actividad cerebral en un área misteriosa, que ellos suponen responsable del amor. Pero no podían responderme con certeza. Hace tan sólo unos días, los periódicos anunciaban que, gracias a la tecnología de las resonancias magnéticas, ya podíamos leer y transcribir los pensamientos ajenos casi al pie de la letra. Por supuesto, ese titular no era periodismo, sino propaganda. Aún estamos lejos de llegar a ese extremo. La poesía sigue siendo necesaria, y por fortuna, no es incompatible con la ciencia, más bien todo lo contrario.

Jorge Carrión: ¿Cómo llegaste a la historia de La leyenda del tiempo? ¿Cómo fueron los viajes previos hasta el viaje definitivo –el rodaje?

Isaki Lacuesta: Fui a San Fernando de vacaciones, poco antes de estrenar Cravan, y quedé prendado de su modo de vida. La bahía de Cádiz me fascina, y no he dejado de pensar que algún día seré un joven jubilado gaditano. Durante los años siguientes, regresé varias veces, ya con la idea de hacer una película, que es una de las mejores excusas que existen para instalarte a vivir durante una temporada en un lugar ajeno. Partíamos de una serie de intuiciones, de anotaciones muy breves sobre cómo podía ser “La leyenda”. Después, una vez conseguida la financiación, hicimos un casting en busca de los personajes: este cásting era fundamental, porque no sólo buscábamos a los intérpretes, sino también el argumento de la película.  A partir de aquí, planteamos un rodaje de nueve semanas, dividido en tres etapas (diciembre, febrero y julio), con el objetivo de tener tiempo para repensar lo que estábamos haciendo y dejar crecer a los personajes. Para un rodaje así, es fundamental la complicidad de los protagonistas y de todo el equipo técnico. Es lo más parecido a trabajar y vivir en familia, con todo lo bueno y lo malo que esto conlleva. Desde luego, les estoy muy agradecido a todos, porque hay que ser muy generoso para embarcarse en un rodaje como aquél, trabajando tanto tiempo sin guión y sin saber hacia dónde diablos nos dirigíamos.

Jorge Carrión: En tu modus operandi, por tanto, es importante estar atento a los estímulos que te proporciona el propio viaje... El guión está abierto... ¿Hasta qué punto también las lecturas son importantes en este sentido?

Isaki Lacuesta: En la misma medida en que pueda serlo todo lo que nos rodea: una canción, un tropiezo, un programa de televisión, un encuentro o una conversación escuchada en el tren pueden servirte como punto de partida de una escena. De todos modos, en este sentido, La leyenda es una película muy poco libresca, y seguramente me marcaron más las letras de muchas canciones populares que ningún libro.

Jorge Carrión: ¿Has pensado en “adaptar” algún texto literario?

Isaki Lacuesta: Sí, varios, aunque de forma muy poco literal. Supongo que todo llegará a su debido tiempo... De momento, aunque no sea una adaptación, para mi próxima película, Los condenados (una historia que ocurre en la Argentina actual, coescrita con Isa Campo) hemos pensado mucho en el tono moral de Joseph Conrad, sobre todo en su libro Una visión desde Occidente.

Jorge Carrión: ¿Cuál es tu primer recuerdo como lector, entendiendo “lectura” en el sentido más amplio (cine, publicidad, literatura, artes visuales...)?

Isaki Lacuesta: Me recuerdo de niño leyendo las caricaturas de El Periódico. Mi padre trabajaba entonces en una empresa de alpargatas y yo pensaba que el que aparecía en las caricaturas del diario era su jefe, al que confundía con el presidente del gobierno Adolfo Suárez. Parece ser que en mi mente infantil aquellas dos figuras tan poderosas se mezclaban en una sola. Y la primera novela que recuerdo haber leído es Los piratas del Halifax de Julio Verne, aunque sé que no fue la primera.

Jorge Carrión: ¿Y el último?

Isaki Lacuesta:Ahora estoy leyendo la Autobiografía de Chesterton y soy adicto al blog de Arcadi Espada y al dibujante Liniers. Por si no lo conoces, te recomiendo encarecidamente a Liniers, que es un poeta, el Lewis Carrol de los pingüinos.  Y también recuerdo haber leído hace poco un titular en El Mundo que decía: “Patrick Swayze lucha contra el fantasma del cáncer de páncreas”. Escribir un juego de palabras tan miserable como éste debería ser delito.

A conversation between Katsuhiro Otomo and Koji Morimoto

First meetings, new animation ...

Otomo: I think we first met doing Genma Taisen.

Morimoto: I was observing you from a distance. You were hunched over your desk like this ... so close to the paper that I thought, "Is he asleep?"

Otomo: No way was I asleep. I was probably just trying to block out my surroundings.

Morimoto: After that we worked side-by-side for the first time on Order To Halt Construction from Manie Manie.

Otomo: While you were doing key frames we talked about alot of different things. Later, Robot Carnival was like that too. It was very interesting to work with animators like you and Kitakubo, Inoue, Nakamura. It seemed like everyone was trying to do something different and unique.

Morimoto: Madhouse itself was like that. That all came from Rintaro, making films with such a powerful visual impact. Bringing in folks from art school or with no animation experience to work as colorists and stuff.

Otomo: That started even before at Mushi Productions.Beliadonna and One Thousand And One Nights. Alot of pretty strange work.

Moderator: What about Morimoto's first directorial effort Franken's Gears ...

Morimoto: Didn't really have the freedom to think about doing new things. Was overloaded just trying to do what had to be done. But the challenge of drawing robots that was fun. I like robots. During Robot Carnival and Manie Manie you introduced me to music by Art Of Noise ...

Otomo: Music is such an important part of moviemaking. Difficult too. When I was doing Order To Halt Construction I was listening to Hajime Tachibana but didn't actually use that music for the film. Didn't think it would go with the final images. Since then I try to avoid making decisions about music while storyboarding. You never know if something's going to work until you hear what your music staff puts together.

Morimoto: I'm always listening to music. Sometimes listening to it as though it were sound effects.

Otomo: With your music video Extra you already had music from the beginning.

Morimoto: Music helps extract some good images from within you. The first music that had that impact on me was YMO. When I was doing Tomorrow's Joe that's all I listened to. When working with director Desaki I was just hearing "Tokyo!" and stuff like that.

Otomo: (laughs) That's totally different!

Morimoto: Big mistake, Japanese country music. But YMO was very stimulating. I was always baffled by the crazy sounds they managed to make. And after that, you introduced me to Art Of Noise and Kraftwerk. That start– ed everything.

Sketches and stories ...

Morimoto: In the old days, you told me, "Your drawings have no life in them.'"

Otomo: "They don't! "

Morimoto: I always have one idea and then try and build a story around it.

Otomo: Don't you think of movement before story? 

Morimoto: Yes, right. Probably just thinking "It would be interesting if this guy did this" and using that as a point of departure from which to draw. I think I'd have to multiply that by a factor of one thousand to complete a feature film. I'd like that.

Otomo: I felt that way when I saw The Tin Drum years ago. It was just like he made one scene at a time and the final film was those scenes strung together. Like, "Ok, here's the scene where the mother eats an eeL .. " and stuff like that. A lot of short films put together. Worked really well.

Morimoto: It can be really interesting to compose things as a series of shorts.

Otomo: Same with a lot of European movies. Fellini, stuff like that.

Otomo: Sometimes it can just be drawing absurd pictures to go with an absurd event. Like drawing "autumn" and then drawing "winter". And before you know it you're done.

Morimoto: Maybe I'm like that too. People always say they don't get my stories. Maybe I'm just not interested in how the main character evolves.

Moderator: Perhaps you're just more involved in intense characters and continuing to string out one particular gag or another.

Otomo: There's alot of them in this book of yours. 

Morimoto: Sometimes I'm drawing because I'm interested in the film itself but other times it's just a particular idea that strikes me, like a light bulb going on in my head.

Otomo: You should draw a weird character like that. 

Morimoto: I'll slyly direct the conversation away from myself by asking you why you don't work like that. 

Otomo: Just absurd stuff? I always think about it. Sometimes when I'm tired I'll put on a Fellini film. I love watching his films.

Morimoto: Feels so absurd sometimes. I drew the characters in here because I was interested in these types of characters. But at one time I was just doing mechanical stuff and backgrounds - no characters at all. That was fun too.

Otomo: Do you ever think of your childhood? .

Morimoto: Can't remember. But Wakayama Prefebture is covered with ruins. Lots of interesting scenery, but I was just playing when I was a child.

Otomo: I've heard about Wakayama in old times. Intense. I think that prefecture has a very strong survival instinct!

Morimoto: But I'm in love with cities, crowded and messy. Can't draw anything of nature.

Otomo: Why not?

Morimoto: Tedious.

Otomo: (laughs) It takes all kinds. People who hate to draw trees and stuff like that. But trees are much funner than man-made objects.

Morimoto You like drawing trees?

Otomo: Yes, yes. But I never have any in my stories. Morimoto : Something really crazy, like your version of Hansel And Gret!.

Otomo: I like that story. The trees there are not normal though.

Morimoto: The trees that you draw are like ruins though. I like when there's fine detail and interesting textures. 

Otomo: Tons of that stuff in Wakayama! Such a green place.

Morimoto: I liked tunnels more than trees. The ones that cut through mountains and stuff like that. They have some for irrigating the rice fields. There were some near my elementary school. Used to go there on the way home. Totally falling apart.

Otomo: Dangerous!

Morimoto: Very! People always told me to stay away from them (laughs). Bats flying in and out of them. Badger nests and stuff. I once crawled in an enormous hole and found badgers.

Otomo: Really? In my home town, people said they were very cute. Surprising. Doesn't that feeling come out in your artwork? So intense.

Morimoto: In those days, I just thought it was normal to take a tunnel to school. There were no buildings around. So I was very intrigued by the big city. It was so great going to Osaka. In a way it's even more messy than Tokyo. Like something from Blade Runner. Cooooll! Made my heart beat faster wandering around there. Where did you like going to when you first came to Tokyo?

Otomo: Mmm. When I first came to Tokyo, I found Ueno amazing. Like being in a different era. Just after the war or something. There were all these old shops lined up on the railway platform. I loved those kind of messy, dirty places. Nothing like my home town.

Morimoto: I always wonder what's next after Blade Runner. Not something like Kowloon City, though that's something fun to draw also. Eventually maybe there'll be green conduits and tunnels instead ot trees. Maybe eventually machines and plants will merge ...

Otomo: Perhaps things will evolve to a larger scale. That would be interesting.

Morimoto: It would be nice to see this kind of line style in a film.

Otomo: Vegetation is a motif you see in Gaudi's artwork. Like the Sagrada Familia vegetables and piants on a macro scale. That's cool. Not just normal vegetation, but really strange stuff.

Morimoto: I grew up in the mountains so I have a sense for the forest and green areas. Maybe it's unrelated but my drawings now are less about complicated forms than about curves, which I find very pleasant to draw.

Otomo: People who draw end up liking those kinds of curves. Feels good drawing them.

Morimoto: It's like drawing and hoping you'll find a good line in there somewhere. Spending three months doing that can be fun. But for some reason the characters always seem.so far away. Like I'm trying to catch up with them. (laughs)

Otomo: I don't really sketch that much. In my case thinking of the next story, the words and such.

Morimoto: Don't you think there's a difference in stories that begin as words and stories that begin as pictures? I think manga and animation's power comes from the drawings, so don't you feel like things are moving in the wrong direction when your head is full of words instead of pictures? Often I feel like I just want to forget language altogether.

Otomo: I get to that when I storyboard. Trying to come up with cinematic pictures, camerawork, lighting, lenses. I don't think stories emerge from the line artwork. I was thinking of a manga idea recently and I found I was thinking very cinematically, even though I was planning a manga not a movie.

Morimoto: From the beginning?

Otomo: Yes, from the beginning. Like "this is how I'll compose this frame." There's not too many characters in this. I don't think "this guy should be wearing these kinds of clothing." If I start thinking of stuff like "there's this strange machine over here" and "what's this thing over here", I never build up momentum.

Morimoto: I know what you mean. I always get stuck at the same point. While writing the story I get hung up on details. But if I don't think of the details I can't move forward with the story.

Otomo: I know what you mean. When I think of manga, for example something in eastern Europe, or anything for that matter, thinking of background details can be so time consuming. It's hard to come up with pictures you're actually pleased with. You sometimes start to hate everything that's in your head! And you know your taste and your strengths if you're always drawing. But you want to draw scenes that you've never seen before, buildings that don't look like the buildings you draw. And eventually you have to populate these scenes also. 

Morimoto: There's some sense of comfort or balance in your work and you have to destroy that.

Otomo: You start drawing and then you think "oh no, not this again."

Morimoto: Yes! That's why I always start to reverse the direction of the drawings, or see things a bit differently. I always feel like I'm trying to break free of the gravity of the place I'm at. It feels safe to have my feet on the ground here so I know something interesting' will come

from destroying that. '

Otomo: There's definitely a weightless feeling in your drawings. Maybe that's from music?

Morimoto: Weightlessness is the best. I'd love to be able to fly.

Moderator: There was the flying stuff in your Animalrix episode Beyond ...

Otomo: And your short film Noiseman too. 

Morimoto: I didn't really feel I directed those too well. Like in music, particularly trance music, there's that moment where you're thinking "it's and then "boom!" That's the kind of music I like. 

Otomo: Visceral pleasure.

Morimoto: That's the kind of music I'm fixated on. Techno starts out very simple and then gets heavier, but that's just a fixed pattern. And while you hold on to that pattern, there's other stuff changing as well. And you never know exactly where it's taking you.

Drawing with an eye towards the future ...

Morimoto: This book is a collection of sketches, but right now I'm trying to draw a manga.

Otomo: A short?

Morimoto: Yes. I have the basic story, but not the actual panels worked out. I have it all in my head but when I start to draw it takes up too many pages. Any advice? 

Otomo: (laughs) I'll have to think about that and get back to you.

Morimoto: I don't really know enough about manga, like why you sometimes use triangular panels or trapezoids. 

Otomo: Trapezoids are tough. You could do what Moebius does and try and just work out each individual panel's structure.

Morimoto: I realized that picture structure can really help dialog flow naturally. Just put the dialog where the reader's eye goes and you get a very easy-to-read manga. I just realized that recently. Obvious?

Otomo: (laughs) Everyone's doing that. Well, unlike animation, you can use very wide compositions and biframes. So when you really want someone to spend time looking at a picture you can draw it big. Can't do that with animation. That's a big limitation. Every scene is drawn in the same proportions and size. Storyboards can end up looking very empty. Are you going to do the manga in color? Will you use halftones?

Morimoto: Digital. I've never used a G-pen.

Otomo: You should! You'd be like a real manga artist. Draw with a pen on Kent paper.

Morimoto: I have to do a lot of layering to get the pictures I want. That's' how you do animation. If you want to add something you just add another layer. "A eel, B eeL .. " like that. Of course I do my rough drawings all together.

Otomo: Better to just draw on instinct. If you have the ability to correct, you'll never finish.

Morimoto: I know, I know. But I'm so used to dealing with each element individually.

Moderator: Listening to you speak about sketching and stories, I feel like you two are total opposites.

Otomo: I think about the entire image first. A certain feeling or a way of drawing a particular character. Always want to do something that's not entirely familiar to me. That's probably a bit unique. Most people probably want to express everything that they have inside, but guys like me want to do something totally new every time. Maybe it's more important to value your own ideas. Like Akira  and things like that. But by the time I'm finished with a project my head is already somewhere else.

Morimoto: That probably is a big difference between us. I feel like I'm just drawing my world. Everything occurring in the same city. Same locations. Or perhaps you could compare it to different rooms in the same apartment building. That's the world I want to draw. The city's bakery, noodle shop, etc. Strange items in that world. The 'people who live in that world.

Otomo: Sounds like a remix! Ok I get it, so you want to do a whole city.

Morimoto: A city that I like.

Otomo: I want to go someplace I've never been! I like looking at a picture and thinking "this is something I would have never imagined". Some little alleyway in Mexico. Or an old house with buildings in the distance, and in the foreground an adobe wall with birds on it. Dirty children sitting in the mud. That would be great. That kind of back alley. That's what I like.

Morimoto: In the manga I'm thinking of now there's a strange scene with a little girl. You know those school crossing zones painted on the streets? I was thinking of an "old zone". When you step into the old zone ...

Otomo: I have to do something interesting like that. Maybe do another manga ... Yeah, a "strange zone" .... (laughs)

Morimoto: (laughs) No, no. I can't wait to see your next manga. As a fan of yours, I have to say I love your movies but I also want to read your manga. Thanks for your time today. You've inspired me!
 

(Originally post on March 2012)