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Clearly, Jeanne Dielman and Bicycle Thieves are both ‘movement' films. The influence of the women's movement was crucial for Chantal Akerman; Vittorio De Sica's films of the late 1940s are exemplary of neorealism, pioneering the use of non-professional actors and location shooting, and committed to depicting the social problems of post-World War II Italy.
No, I never consciously place symbolism in my writing. That would be a self-conscious exercise and self-consciousness is defeating to any creative act. Better to let the subconscious do the work for you, and get out of the way. The best symbolism is always unsuspected and natural. I'm not sure it's a good idea for a working novelist to concern himself too much with the technical aspects of the matter [symbolism]. Generally, the best symbols in a novel are those you become aware of only after you finish the work. Some of
the great writers of classics consciously, intentionally planned and placed symbols in their writing
(Joyce, Dante) more than others (Homer) but it is impossible to think of any significant work of narrative art without a symbolic dimension of some sort. Man is a symbol-making and -using animal. Language itself is a symbolic form of communication. The great writers all used symbols as a means of controlling the form of their fiction. Some place it there subconsciously, discovered it and then developed it. Others started out consciously aware and in some instances shaped the fiction to the symbols.
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Note: In my honest opinion, I like metaphor, not just for the sake of it but rather the experience of discovering it. As audience, realization of metaphor usually makes films better (though not always). In a dark alley on the way out of Goethe Institute, the young me realized that the ending of Germany, Pale Mother (1980) could turn the whole film to be metaphoric letter to the whole generation of German youth. (Though it's quite obvious now for the old me.) At a crowded bus stop after FilmVirus screening, the young me discovered that three strangers in Vive L'Amour (1994) could be interpreted as a dysfunctional family of two parents and their estranged son living in Taipei without souls. Those experiences made those films great for me, and maybe only me, not anyone else. On the contrary, this experience is the reason I didn't much appreciate Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes (1964) film, since I already had this realization of its metaphors in Kôbô Abe's book and those metaphors were not translated well enough for me as movie. In another example, I was once invited to be a commentator for student-films screening. There were some films that when I told the filmmakers what their films would mean if they were intended to be metaphors, and they were amazed how different those films were, compared to their actual attitudes. This is problem when you create narratives but not realize that they could be interpreted as somethings against your opinions. And as filmmaker, films should stand firmly on their feet, with or without metaphor. There were some times when I finished my films and found some new metaphors that I might unconsciously put in the films. Then they made me surprised and grateful that I might learn something more about my own self. Be it narcissistic, art appreciation could be very individualistic and personal. So feel free to dig into the ground (I'm looking at you, Woman in the Dunes). What you might find maybe just a drop of water to other people, but it could be a big fountain for yourselves.
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Marlon Brando had such an enormous influence on the psychology of men in America. If you look at the “great” generation of American actors like Dustin Hoffman, Robert DeNiro, Robert Duvall, Gene Hackman, Al Pacino, Morgan Freeman, Meryl Streep, that's all the post-Brando generation. All of them wanted to become actors because of Marlon Brando. He so rewrote the idea of what it was, what it could be. It was like what Bob Dylan did in the culture. It just rewrote the game. It's the worst thing ever when you open a script and read the words ‘strong female lead'. That makes me roll my eyes. I'm already out. I'm bored. Those roles are written as incredibly stoic, you spend the whole time acting tough and saying tough things...
Write me like a guy and I'll do the ‘girl' stuff. Just write me as you would a man: fallible and complex and difficult and shady. And we are still having to remind people to not hold women to a certain ideal. In the diaspora, the Africa we tend to hear about is this fantasy place. Because it's hard to tell a child about slavery – it's so dire and so awful that you kind of have to balance it with something. So we get this fairy-tale version of Africa. ‘We were kings and queens, and we walked around and ate perfect food, and everyone was free.' It becomes kind of like Wakanda. We never worried about any of this stuff with the ‘Naked Gun' or ‘Scary Movie' films. We could be as offensive as we like. We went where the laughs were. We never thought that we were offending anyone, but if we were offending people we knew we were on the right track. As time went on, it got to be the '90s and the 2000s and it did change… When we do screenings of ‘Airplane!' we get the question if we could do ‘Airplane!' today. The first thing I could think of is sure, just without the jokes. I think Stanley Kubrick said that the only original contribution to film, different from all the other arts, because it comprises only… it combines all the other arts, really, but the only thing that's originally film is editing. It's the editing process. I said, ‘Mr. Farhadi, I want to tell you that the idea and the plot of my documentary are mine,' He answered, ‘O.K.' And I asked him, ‘So you agree?' He said, ‘O.K.' I don't want a contract. I don't want money. I just want you to acknowledge that this day occurred. So we will take a picture of us in front of the whiteboard as we start writing the script together. Then, when the film comes out, and you don't acknowledge me, and you just forget who I was, I will show you this picture. At least you will know that there was a moment when this happened. When I did things like [Miracleman] and Watchmen, they were critiques of the superhero genre. They were trying to show that any attempt to realize these figures in any kind of realistic context will always be grotesque and nightmarish. But that doesn't seem to be the message that people took from this. They seemed to think, uh, yeah, dark, depressing superheroes are, like, cool. The creation of Rorschach [a masked vigilante who is one of Watchmen's main characters]—I was thinking, well, everybody will understand that this is satirical. I'm making this guy a mumbling psychopath who clearly smells, who lives on cold baked beans, who has no friends because of his abhorrent personality. I hadn't realized that so many people in the audience would find such a figure admirable. America has always been a great melting pot but there are few things that have been created here and then given back to the world. [and cinema is one of those few things.] This is a shoot-the-messenger situation. I'm just telling you what I see, as a guy who has been in this business for 25 years. I don't know that the market is going to be able to support art-house films the way that it did in the past...
I've got four kids, so I can identify Gen Z's habits pretty accurately. They don't have the same emotional connection to watching things in a theater. It's simply because we have such a great collection and variety of supernatural folklore that the rest of the world has never seen before. Last time I checked – I was making a list of ghosts and mythological creatures coming from Indonesia – we have 44 distinct ones. In Southeast Asia, we have such a rich tradition of ghost stories. We love telling our kids these stories! When I was a kid, if my mother did not tell me a scary story, I wouldn't be able to fall asleep. [ laughs ] So that's our culture. Because we have such a wide and unique library of horror, our movies feel fresh, especially from the perspective of a Western audience. I love evil Godzilla, but he's everything. He's an all-purpose monster. He takes care of business, always takes care of business, but he's fought everybody, and he's respected the world around. This character has fought so many different kinds of monsters, it's unreal. I like him as evil, up to no good, but that's changing. He has a son -- it's unbelievable, he got really silly in the '70s, but that's cool. That was a little unfair because it wasn't called ‘Tim Burton's Nightmare
Before Christmas' until three weeks before the film came out. And I would have been fine with that, if that's what I signed up for.
I mean, Tim is a genius—or he certainly was in his most creative years. I always thought his story was perfect, and he designed the main characters. But it was really me and my team of people who brought that to life. When I look at these big, spectacular films — I'm looking at you, Marvel and DC — it doesn't matter how old the characters are, they all act like they're in college. They have relationships, but they really don't. They never hang up their spurs because of their kids. The things that really ground us and give us power, love, and a purpose? Those characters don't experience it, and I think that's not the way to make movies. Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934) was a bridge between the surrealism of 1920s French cinema and the poetic realism of the 1930s...
Vigo was kinder and more forgiving than the Surrealists, however, and less morbid than the poetic realists.
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