Williams on Reichardt

Michelle Williams might be best known for working with Steven Spielberg on The Fabelmans or Martin Scorsese on Shutter Island. But fans of art house films know her best for four Kelly Reichardt films: Wendy and Lucy (2008), Meek’s Cutoff (2010), Certain Women (2016) and Showing Up (2022). Reichardt appeared on the first episode of The Drunk Projectionist. In this video, Williams talks to Variety about working with Reichardt on Wendy and Lucy, a movie about a restless woman struggling to find her lost dog.

Inside Paul Murphy's Head

Paul Murphy, the special effects coordinator on Fargo, says, “People focus on the darkest scenes in movies.”

Special effects experts make the pretend things, like amputated legs sticking out of wood chippers, seem real. That was Paul Murphy’s job on Fargo. I interviewed Murphy in 2020 for A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere: The Untold Story of the Making of Fargo. I didn’t include every detail from our conversation in the book, but I’m sharing some additional tidbits here, including how difficult it was to make a few fake snowflakes fall gently outside a window for a scene that didn’t make the final cut. We began by talking about the wood chipper scene.

Paul Murphy: The leg was probably the last thing that was shoved through the chipper technically in a scene like that. The whole body would have went through before that. That’s why [Joel Coen] wanted that big wide swath of land [covered with blood].

Todd Melby: Jerry’s wife was probably put through the chipper, but we never see that. Then I noticed next to the [chipper] I see what looks to be part of a fake corpse underneath a tarp.

Paul Murphy: There were more people that were killed in that cabin, so I believe he had two or three corpses. I think this was the first of two or three. Then Fran showed up, the sheriff. She showed up at the cabin and heard the wood chipper down below, the noise and commotion and that’s what attracted her down to that area and then she seen what was going on. There were more bodies to be chopped up.

Todd Melby: It’s still wild that this is such an iconic scene in American cinema and probably world cinema for that matter.

Paul Murphy: Well, it’s funny how people react to different things. People focus on the darkest scenes in the movie a lot in a lot of features. I thought about that as I was making movies and working on films. I know it’s the suspense and what happens to the bad guys and all that. It was surprising to me that everyone focused on the wood chipper and the wood chipper was so popular. It’s the most popular scene in the movie by far.

“ Joel and Ethan are very particular on their scenes. They want them to be as accurate as the script. There wasn’t a lot of room if something couldn’t happen exactly the way they wanted it to happen. They would figure out a way to make it happen.”

— Paul Murphy

Todd Melby: For sure. There are other scenes where people are talking with the accent in a particularly funny way and something is said that people also get a big kick out of like with the two hookers, the Asian guy, Stephen Park who played Mike Yanagita. The more I step back and think about it, the more impressed I am.

Paul Murphy: Well, Joel and Ethan are very particular on their scenes. They want them to be as accurate as the script. There wasn’t a lot of room if something couldn’t happen exactly the way they wanted it to happen. They would figure out a way to make it happen.

I remember one scene in particular. We were in the third or fourth story of a building in downtown Minneapolis and three or four of the main characters were in a room looking out the window. Joel just wanted a couple of snowflakes to fall past the window outside. 

We were up on the roof. Typically, with a scene like that, you just drop snow out of your hand. It was the top story that they were in, so we were right above them or two stories above them. It was a pretty windy night that night and the updraft kept on pushing the snow back up. I remember we couldn’t get any snow down to that window from where we were, so we had to come up with a new idea. 

I went down [to the indoor shooting location] and Joel was getting real frustrated because [he wasn’t seeing snowflakes like he wanted]. I went down and had a talk with him and said, “Look, we’ve got a constant updraft. It’s very difficult to get anything down there.” He was frustrated with that. As an effects coordinator, you never want to tell the director, “No, you can’t do it,” especially if it’s scripted. 

What we ended up doing was taking a piece of PVC right down to the top of the window. It was about one inch in diameter and we just started dropping a few snowflakes through that. The updraft caught it but it swirled it and dropped it right in front the window exactly like he wanted it. We just got lucky. 

It’s those small things. Typically, that would be a piece of cake, that scene, but Mother Nature was fighting us all the way that night.

Todd Melby: I would never have thought that it would be that difficult. Maybe he didn’t either. If you’re not the person dropping the snowflakes, you wouldn’t even think about an updraft.

Paul Murphy: Exactly. And that’s why he was so frustrated because it should have been such a simple scene.

Todd Melby: Do you remember what Joel said?

Paul Murphy: I went down and explained what was going on to him and I said, “We’ll come up with something.” I remember exactly what he said. He said, “I don’t believe you.” That’s what he said. He said, “I don’t believe you, but let’s go for it.” I was frustrated.

Todd Melby: You mean he didn’t believe you that there was an updraft?

Paul Murphy: Yes, that’s exactly what he said. That kind of a scene, there [were] actors involved, there was dialogue involved. There was no precise moment to drop the snow, he just wanted to see a few flakes falling during the scene. We did have a cue for action. I think we were on the third or fourth take and that’s when I went down to explain to him and then he said, “I don’t believe you, but I’ll go with it.” 

I said, “We’re going to try something different.” That’s when we got the PVC. One of the crew members came up with that idea. I said, “Yeah, it sounds good. Let’s try it.” 

Todd Melby: Speaking of snow, I read that there was very little or no snow in Minneapolis the winter of 1995.

Paul Murphy: Yes, that’s why we had to head up north.

Todd Melby: Maybe we should talk about exterior snow that you had to do for various scenes in Minneapolis. Maybe we could talk about the North Dakota, northern Minnesota snow. How frustrated were Joel and Ethan that there was no natural snow?

Paul Murphy: That was a huge move for them, the decision to move up North and to start the movie up there. Logistically and financially, it throws everything out of whack. 

I think as it turned out, it was the only choice to make, but it was a smart choice. Most of the scenes went without a hitch up there. 

As far as the cover snow, they had plenty of it up there, so they could do just about anything they wanted. It snowed a lot, so if we had to reshoot something the next day or a few days later, all the tracks were covered, and it was a fresh scene again. We got lucky that way with the ground snow.

Then we created our own snow. We had the option to make real snow. We had a 3,000 gallon water truck with a device on it that made foam snow. Once we did that, the foam snow would settle in and it would like just like real snow and you could cover a large area if you had to. You could cover half a block in 20 or 30 minutes. 

We had all those tools, but still, the little scenes were the ones that got us. It was really frustrating because Mother Nature did not cooperate.

Remembering Dorothy Spencer

Despite being nominated for four editing Academy Awards, The New York Times overlooked Dorothy Spencer. When she died in 2002, the Times failed to note her passing. But as part of its Overlooked series, the newspaper has made amends, publishing an obituary about the woman who edited Stagecoach (1939), Decision Before Dawn (1951), Cleopatra (1963) and Earthquake (1974).

Born in 1909, Spencer began working as junior employee at a film lab while still a teenager. During the silent era, she worked as an assistant editor. In 1937, she cut ten films in single year. While editing Stagecoach, she chose to break the 180-degree rule, which argues that to avoid confusing the viewer, the editor must never pivot greater than 180-degrees. during an edit.

“Disorienting and confusing the audience, it created a closer bond between viewers and the characters in the stagecoach, who are themselves thoroughly disoriented and confused. So, rather than compromising the cinematic experience, this deliberate breaking of the 180-degree rule actually intensified it.”

— David Meuel, “Women Film Editors: Unseen Artists of American Cinema”

Spencer also edited Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944) and Valley of the Dolls (1967). For Valley of the Dolls, the Times credits her with using French New Wave techniques: “Patty Duke spits out water in the shower, does a multiple-exposure somersault, exercises on a rowing machine (with the top half and the bottom half of the screen deliberately out of sync) and gets married — a significant plot point, seen only in a black-and-white still photograph.”

Other Bodies In The Swamp

In The Moment of Psycho: How Alfred Hitchcock Taught America To Love Murder, David Thomson dedicates a chapter to movies deeply influenced by the 1960 thriller. The list is long and full of wonderful insights. Definitely buy the book for the full experience.

A few highlights:

• Klute (1971): “Klute ends with with the killer killed, but there are so many other things to be afraid of, not least the climate of paranoia.”

• Don’t Look Now (1973): “This is the Daphne Du Maurier story that Hitchcock did not take up. … There in the middle it has one of the most uninhibited love scenes ever filmed (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie). In its warmth and tenderness, and in its solace for two wounded people, it is not just unlike anything in Hitchcock, it is beyond him.”

• Dressed To Kill (1980): “It was camp Hitchcock, a summer vacation Psycho for rich kids.”

Inside Roger Ebert's Boyhood Home

While attending Ebertfest, I had the opportunity to stay at Roger Ebert’s boyhood home. Located at the corner of Maple and Washington Streets in Urbana, Illinois, the two-bedroom house is an Airbnb rental. It’s easy to image a young Roger stomping around this one-story house with wood floors, a small fireplace and cozy bedrooms. I slept in the room with two twin beds because it seemed most like a child’s room. It also had a card catalog, Illinois banners and a photo of Ebert with his Gene Siskel, the film critic from the Chicago Tribune. Ebert wrote for the rival Chicago Sun-Times, a tabloid newspaper.

While Ebert is best known for his film criticism, he’s also remembered his screenwriting work on Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. There’s a framed newspaper ad about the fireplace bragging about the movie grossing $577,192 in its first five days in New York, $330,996 in its first two weeks in Los Angeles, and $69,095 in its first week at the Roosevelt Theatre in Chicago. I also liked the framed essay Ebert wrote about the Art, a single-screen cinema in Champaign, Illinois, where he saw La Dolce Vita, Woman in the Dunes and L’Avventura.

Wrote Ebert, “I remember those movies at the Art so vividly. The poster is outside, with a stark surrealistic images and bizarre typography. The earnest Bohemians in the lobby, sipping their coffee and talking like the captions on New Yorker cartoons. The notion that in a movie you would never heard of you could discover truth you would never dreamed.”

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2.2:1 or 1.85:1

I love it when I learn stuff on Twitter.

This not-too-recent, but super educational missive from the Music Box Theatre in Chicago explains why aspect ratios matter. For a 70MM screening of Licorice Pizza, the Music Box installed a bigger temporary screen in front of its usual screen. Rebecca Lyon, assistant technical director, says that’s because not every 70MM is created equal.

To give you the best viewing experience for our 🎞️70MM🎞️ presentation of LICORICE PIZZA, we've re-installed our extra-large screen!

Find out why this happens in the video below, and don't miss LICORICE PIZZA on 70MM!

Showtimes & Advance Tickets: https://t.co/H19xGz3IIO pic.twitter.com/KWEH4zxkIc

— Music Box Theatre (@musicboxtheatre) December 30, 2021

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn

I can’t image New York’s Film Forum includes many warnings on movies. But there it was, at the counter when I purchased my ticket for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn: “Warning: Contains several scenes with explicit sexual content. But it’s a comedy.”

Film Forum was right about the explicit sexual content, but I wouldn’t call the Romanian movie by Radu Jude a comedy. I didn’t laugh much. I was shocked by the opening sequence, then disgusted by the behavior of my fellow humans in the middle and last sections of the film. This is must-see cinema and I’m grateful there are filmmakers like Jude in the world, uncompromising in their vision and unafraid to take chances.

Up next: The Criterion Channel is streaming five earlier Jude films, including The Exodus of Trains, a Holocaust documentary.

Joe Eszterhaus: Playboy 1998

I’ve been thinking about Paul Verhoeven and Joe Eszterhaus lately. The pair worked together on Basic Instinct and Showgirls. When I learned Eszterhaus was the subject of a 1998 Playboy interview, I bought a copy on Ebay and began reading.

Eszterhaus was born in Hungary, grew up in Cleveland, worked as a reporter for the Plain-Dealer, then landed a job at Rolling Stone. At RS, he worked with Hunter S. Thompson and once watched him get high at a party. In 1978, his first effort made it to the screen: F.I.S.T.

Next, Eszterhaus rewrote Flashdance, helping make that movie a hit.

When this interview was published, Showgirls had flopped and had been widely panned. In more recent years, there’s been a reappraisal, including It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls, by critic Adam Nayman.

Here are a few Joe Eszterhaus highlights from that 1998 interview:

• On Paul Verhoeven: “He’s my evil twin.”

• On the success of Basic Instinct grossing $350 million worldwide: “That created a certain hubris on our part.”

• On Showgirls: “There was a surrealism we thought was organic to the savage Vegas underside we were trying to put on-screen.”

• A play-by-play of a Verhoeven-Eszterhaus confrontation. Verhoeven: “I’m the director, yah? You’re the screenwriter, yah? You do what I tell you to do.” Eszterhaus: “Listen, if you come across the table at me again like that, I’m going to hit you.”

• Playboy: “You describe [Showgirls] as a spiritual message that is delivered on a personal level.” Eszterhaus: “In retrospect, it was a godawful stupid thing to say. I think the religious right in this country has a straitjacketing, chilling effect on artistic expression. I was sort of thumbing my nose at the whole thing in what I considered to be an impish way. But it was a stupid thing to do. People took it literally.”

• Drew Barrymore and Madonna were intrigued with the Elizabeth Berkley part. Verhoeven visited Barrymore and told Eszterhaus she couldn’t dance well enough. Madonna wanted script changes; Verhoeven refused.

• On screenwriters: “The vision belongs to the writer. Realizing the vision on-screen is what the director does. Too many screenwriters hurt themselves by destroying what they’ve written because they’ve been told to.”

• On writers slumming in Hollywood: “The only screenwriter who defied that and put every ounce of his being into what he wrote and then fought to preserve it on-screen was Paddy Chayefsky it ultimately killed him. Screenwriters need to be more like Paddy and less like William Goldman. There’s a story in Goldman’s Hope and Glory that is emblematic of the kind of screenwriter not to be.”

‘She's Really Running Away From Everything’

Wanda is a film worthy of obsession.

Director Barbara Loden’s 1971 movie about a lonely woman wandering from bar to bar, man to man, trying to escape a sordid existence, was the filmmaker’s only effort. Before making Wanda, Loden was an actor, then married to Elia Kazan. After Wanda, she died young, at age 48. Her movie was largely forgotten until a restoration by UCLA Film Archive.

In this scene, Wanda asks a sewing factory boss for her old job. He declines.

I first saw Wanda at the Trylon Cinema in Minneapolis. Then I saw it again on Criterion, then a third time on Criterion, then I read Nathalie Leger’s excellent Suite for Barbara Loden. If you haven’t seen Wanda, this appreciation from Richard Brody at The New Yorker will give you a sense of the movie’s tone.

In 1972, Loden appeared on the Mike Douglas show at the invitation of Yoko Ono and John Lennon. One of the questions Douglas asks Loden references her husband’s reaction to her ambition: “How does he feel about you making your own film?”

Ugh.

Take the time to watch Wanda, a film John Waters called one of the best “feel-bad movies ever.”

The Fargo Audition Tapes

In researching A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere, The Untold Story of the Making of Fargo, I interviewed Jane Drake Brody, an acting coach and casting director. Brody wasn’t the top casting director on Fargo; John S. Lyons had that honor. But in working with the Coens on The Hudsucker Proxy, she begged The Boys to hire her to work on their next project. They did. She worked out of hotel and conference rooms in Minneapolis, watch local talent tryout for the roles of hookers, cops, customers buying cars, bystanders, and other parts.

Here’s an excerpt form A Lot Can Happen in the Middle of Nowhere:

“Let me do the Minnesota casting,” she told the Coens. “I can cast a lot from up there.”

Brody got the job and a very specific set of recommendations for the kinds of actors they wanted in front of the camera.

“One of their instructions to me was, ‘We only want to see blond people.’ That was one of their big instructions,” she said. “I didn’t follow it completely, but I followed it a lot. And boy, there were some actors in Minnesota who were madder than hell at me that I couldn’t see [them audition]. I knew they were not in the picture that the Coen Brothers had in their head. They were too othered. They were not Scandihoovians.”

During the interview, I asked if she’d taped the auditions. She had.

Where are the tapes?

In the barn.

Can you send them to me? I wondered, trying to not sound desperate.

Jane agreed.

But first she had to find them. Things were disorganized at the country place she’d recently purchased. There was a remodeling project. I would have to wait. Over the next several months, I politely, but persistently asked for the tapes. Finally, a package arrived in the mail. I was very excited.

On this page, are the Fargo auditions of Larissa Kokernot (Hooker #1), Bruce Bohne (Deputy Lou) and Michelle Hutchison (Escort).

Charles Burnett Discusses 'Killer of Sheep'

In Episode 5 of The Drunk Projectionist, host Todd Melby interviewed Charles Burnett, writer and director of Killer of Sheep, a 1978 film about a man who works in a slaughterhouse. Killer of Sheep is a beautiful and haunting movie. In 1990, it was added to the National Film Registry. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Charles Burnett: When I first went to UCLA, it was virtually all white. It was few people of color in the film department. [White people] were making films about, you know, sexual revolution, flower children, all this sort of thing. And those were topics I wasn’t interested in. I was from South Central and we were concerned about other issues, you know, civil rights, the [Black] Panthers and all that sort of thing; a lot of social issues were dominant.

And so when I got into film, the idea was to make films that reflected what the black community was like and what the black experience was like and tell stories that sort of repudiated or contradict the narrative that Hollywood was producing, continuously perpetuating. And so there was a progressive group on campus that were mostly well-to-do kids who were making films about the working class. Some of them had parents who owned factories and things like that. What they had with this formula where the employees had worked together to form a union in spite of the opposition from management. And that's what the struggle was. And then they succeeded to form a union and everything was happy after that, you know.

Todd Melby: Right. Yes.

Charles Burnett: But in my case, and the people I knew, that wasn't the case at all. Getting the job was one thing, holding on to it and getting paid an adequate wage [was another thing]. There were more issues. And so there wasn't any kind of panacea, any kind of formula that would you know, you say A-B-C and A-B-C-D and whatever would happen, you know, following that.

You know, you just endured.

You get a job, you lose it, you get another one. It was an ongoing struggle, continuously. It was never ending. And so those are the kind of people I wanted to ... The stories I wanted to tell.

The people that I looked up to were the people who stayed with their families and tried to work things out, you know, who worked themselves to death in a way with these hard jobs. A friend of mine's father was a plasterer. And in the summertime, we would go to work with him and we would do this hard work, clean up after that, you know, the construction and stuff like that. And we'd take all the cement out of the bathtubs, all this kind of stuff, you know, or try to keep the mixer working. That was hard. I mean, it was, you know, I couldn't do that. I was kind of a small, thin kind of a person at the time. I'd be dead if I did that any long period of time.

Those are kind of people I looked up to. And, you know, what Hollywood was doing was distorting the sort of people in my community that were doing the right thing. So I wanted to make films about that.

Todd Melby: How did the idea of Killer of Sheep come to you?

Charles Burnett: I wanted to do a film where I didn't impose my values on this narrative, but [rather] capture things that I had seen growing up in my community.

Todd Melby: When I watched Killer of Sheep the first time I got the sense that I was just there with these people, almost experiencing it with them. It was that kind of film.

Charles Burnett: I wanted it to have this sort of documentary look to it. Adding to that, I didn't want it to have set-up shots and backlighting all this sort of thing and have, you know, all the proper cuts and angles and things like that. It was like if you shot a documentary, you had to take what you get and move on. Even though it was scripted, I wanted to give the illusion that I just set the camera up and just captured what was there. That wasn't the case at all.

Todd Melby: In an earlier interview, you said, you liked beginning a film with a solid image, a solid idea of theme and then a potential storyline. What was the solid image you thought of when you made Killer of Sheep?

Charles Burnett: I was interested in how kids sort of watch adults act and how the games that they play are very hard and destructive. In the opening scene of Killer Sheep, where one of the parents tells this young kid, you know, about protecting the family and his brother. And even if your brother is wrong or whatever it is, you know, you don't let anyone take advantage of and beat him up or anything.

You know, this is what you do. When someone is attacking your brother, family, whatever it is, you defend them and you don't ask questions of who's right or wrong, you know? I couldn't reconcile that, but I understood it, you know. And so that was one of the things I was interested in. And also the image … this middle-aged couple, like in their late thirties just trying to do the right thing [and] teach their kids, you know, certain values.

Todd Melby: One of the things that's that's so fantastic about Killer of Sheep are the visual images. In nearly every scene, there's something that's striking, that's just terrifically set up. You know, where the camera is stationary and something is happening and you're just enthralled. How are you influenced by still photography? 

Charles Burnett: Well, I used to do to look at a lot of still photos. I think I was excited about being a photojournalist. You know, I'd seen a lot of black and white journalist photography work. I was impressed by the images, what a single image can can convey. And so I actually bought a 35mm camera and started my first day of photojournalism by documenting things in the community. And the first thing a thing I went to was this poor young lady who died of an overdose. And part of her was in the doorway. I mean, the ambulance was there, but they hadn't taken her out yet or anything like that. So everyone was standing around. So I had this camera and I just start taking pictures and walking up and in close. And the police didn't do anything. So the more they allowed me, the more I was just clicking away, clicking away, clicking away. [Then a woman in the neighborhood asked] why are you taking pictures. And I didn't know what to say. I just said something stupid like, ‘Oh, just for fun.’ And she said, ‘You take pictures of tragedy just for fun?’ And all of a sudden that really hit me and I just put my camera away and say, that's the end of that, you know?

Todd Melby: What's your favorite image from Killer of Sheep?

Charles Burnett: I do know one that disturbs me a lot.

Todd Melby: Okay. What?

Charles Burnett: Every time I see it, I cringe. There's a shot of these kids jumping [between] three story buildings, and you'll see it from the bottom up, looking up at these kids, flying over the rooftops and stuff. And it's a gap of like three or four feet between the next building, the jumping from one building to the next. At the time I was doing that, it never occurred to me what would happen to if those kids fell, you know? And the fact of the matter is they did it all the time. And that's where I got the idea to shoot it from because they were doing it. I just wanted to capture, but I shouldn't have done it. I shouldn't have allowed that to happen, you know. And I think about every time I see it. That would have been the end of them, you know. I know all sorts of things are still being going through this day. The repercussions of it. So that makes me cringe a bit when I when I see that scene. I showed you how you know, how how insensitive you can be when you're behind the camera, you allow anything to happen and you can, you know, stand back and look at at a distance even when it's happening. So, you know, you learn a lot about yourself. Look at some images. You know how how selfish you are, how selfish you can be. And so that's, you know, one of the concerns. 

Todd Melby: It is a beautiful image, though. And it actually kind of reminds me of that Eugene Atget photo where somebody is kind of jumping over a bit of water someplace. And then I really like the image of the little girl in the dog mask, you know, because there's a scene with Stan. He's the protagonist of the story. Andhe's under the sink and he comes out and he's talking to a friend of his. And then suddenly his daughter shows up and she's probably five or six years old. And she's got this big dog mask on and you're like, wow.

Charles Burnett: Everything was storyboarded. And I remember having a mask a while before we shot, long before we shot that scene.

Todd Melby: Yeah, you know, it works. Yeah. Whatever reason you did it. It works and it's fantastic. 

Charles Burnett: Well, look, the thing I have about that is I try to make everything as low key as possible to some extent without calling attention to it because you didn't want anything to be cute or anything like that. You want to be like this is know something that was there, like for example, like one of the issues I've always had with the film more than anything, was the whole title Killer of Sheep and the fact that the sheep in the film been slaughtered. And you wanted to not to make that connection symbolically about the slaughter and sheep and the people and all this kind of stuff. It's kind of, you know, fighting an uphill battle because people ask you what's the relation between the sheep and the people? The fact of the matter is, this guy works in this horrible job of killing sheep and the sheep is a placid. They just do whatever.

It's ironic because the Judas goat leads them up to the killing floor and they follow the duties go and then they're slaughtered. I got the idea from this. I was riding the bus one day and I met this young guy who was in work clothes and I was going to UCLA. And he was telling me he worked in a slaughterhouse. And what he did and how he did it. You're killing animals and sheep and stuff like that. At the time, they they used a sledgehammer on the cows. And so thought, ‘That's the kind of job my character needs to have in order to have these problems, you know, mental problems.’

That's where the idea of the sheep came from. It's to create these nightmares. Also the fact that it's a horrible job, but, you know, it's eating. I guess if if you're not a vegetarian, you could say, well, you know, it's a natural thing, you know, to some extent in order to survive and you need the protein, whatever it is. I don't know. But so it's just kind of reconcile that, you know, was one of the issues I was trying to bring out in the film as well, is that, you know, cruelty. You know, in order to survive, I guess you have to be cruel.

Todd Melby: It does help explain why Stan is so depressed.

Charles Burnett: When I was at his meat-packing place up in Vallejo, in northern California, cause you couldn't shoot in L.A. in any of those meatpacking places because the vegetarians got in getting in and started making these movies that were anti meat, you know, meat packing places and stuff like that. And so anyway, so I went in there and even a lot of the workers there and, you know, they would when they when they have a lunch break, you know, they'd wash your hands ago and bring out the sandwiches and and and whatever else and sit on a bench and start eating. I go out where there's a benches out and things like that and and leave these things hanging. You know, I didn't have lunch or anything those days I was there, you know, and I couldn't in fact. And when I when it was over, I became a temporary vegetarian. You know, I couldn't eat meat anymore for a while, but. Yeah, but those guys, you know, they're just they ring the bell, they go get their lunch budget hands and you'll get a lunch box and and go and sit out and miss it, you know. So. So I guess you could you see anything. Right. So. So I don't know. Stan was not. Apparently Stan wasn't that kind. And that certainly Stan goes kills animals to go and eat and forget about what he did. It sort of slowly worked, worked, worked out his nerve or whatever it is. So he was not that particular kind of a person.

Todd Melby: Yeah. There is one point in the film where he says, I'm working myself into my own hell. I can't get no sleep at night, no peace of mind. And then and then his friend Oscar, he says, ‘Why don't you kill yourself?’

Charles Burnett: Here is the thing about his gun and [taking] the easy way out. I mean, he's frustrated, everything like that. But his thing is partly that and trying to keep a sense of who he is.

Todd Melby: And other people can see it, too. They notice that he's down. Think they see that he's depressed. And at one point a couple of his so-called friends try to get him to help out out on a robbery.

Charles Burnett: He's upset because they look at him as depraved at a certain extent, you know, and are willing to do anything. I mean, he had opportunities to, you know, the lady at the store, at his liquor store who offered him a job. Is that, you know, you don’t really have to work that hard and you can come and be in the back with me, you know, and that sort of thing. And, like, life can be easy for you.

Todd Melby: Why did you put the liquor store scene in the movie?

Charles Burnett: That liquor store is round the corner from my house and it was sort of like a meeting place, a watering hole. You know, you would always go to the liquor store for some reason. You know, it was I mean, they had supermarkets, but I think I'd been buying more things at the liquor store than I did any place else. I could just buy it. Not everything. No fruits or anything like that. But, you know, milk, sugar, they had things that you just needed. It was so much a part of the reality of the neighborhood. They had liquor stores in almost every corner, you know. So you don’t have to walk too far to get to one, you know.

Todd Melby: Right. Which makes sense for putting it in the movie. Well, Charles Burnett, thank you so much.

Charles Burnett: Thank you. 

A 15-Minute Primer on Martin Scorsese's Cinematic Choices

Martin Scorsese lit a match to American pop culture when he criticized Marvel movies in a recent interview with a British film magazine.

“I don’t see them. I tried, you know? But that’s not cinema,” he told Empire. “Honestly, the closest I can think of them, as well made as they are, with actors doing the best they can under the circumstances, is theme parks. It isn’t the cinema of human beings trying to convey emotional, psychological experiences to another human being.”

Yeah, I agree.

But Scorsese, the director of Raging Bull, Taxi Driver and The Irishman, took a lot of heat for the comment. So he wrote a spirited defense in The New York Times, which pretty much said the same thing. The fuss led film critic Adam Nyman to compile a list of his favorite Scorsese shots. Watch this 15-minute video and you’ll see some great stuff and learn the difference between a trucking shot and a long take,

The sound of an opium haze

​What does a crazed opium haze sound like?

Sound designers ​like ​​​Steve Boeddeker​ ask themselves these kinds of questions all the time. Boeddecker, who has been nominated for best achievement in sound design for his work on Black Panther and All Is Lost, shared a few secrets with radio producer Jonathan Mitchell in Sound Design From Hell. Grab a pair of really good headphones and give this story a quiet listen because really good sound design can elevate a film. In 2002, Mitchell won an award from the Third Coast International Audio Festival for the piece. He now produces the Truth Fiction podcast.

Apocalypse Now, 1979.

Don’t put away those headphones just yet.

It’s time to learn how the helicopter sounds at the beginning of Apocalypse Now. Walter Murch, author of In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, worked with director Francis Ford Coppola to create the sounds audiences hear actually seeing the war machines soaring above the jungle. This video explains how those sounds were made.

A sound examination of the helicopter flyovers in Apocalypse Now.

Murch isn’t quoted in the video, but here’s what he told Andreas Halskov about the sound of the helicopters: “In the beginning of the film, all you hear is the whap sound of the blade from this ghost helicopter–you don’t hear any of the other sounds. Then, gradually, as the music comes in, this sound disappears slightly, before it comes back again. And it’s only when Willard begins to wake up from his dream, that we start to introduce the realistic sound of the helicopter, and that’s what you hear when you are looking with Willard, and the fan is rotating on the ceiling. So that was a realistic sound of a helicopter, and that was one of the discoveries we made in the process of putting together the film. That was not part of the original plan for the film, but it seemed to work very well, so we went with it.​"​

That Climatic Sword Scene In Sanjuro

What’s the most surprising sword fight in cinematic history? I humbly submit Sanjuro, the 1962 samurai film directed by Akira Kurosawa. The movie stars the brooding Toshiro Mifune, whose shoulders are more expressive than any actor I’ve ever seen. Kurosawa loves shots of Mifune walking away from the camera and rolling his right shoulder forward in a “let’s get on with it” kind of way.

In the movie’s final scene, Mifune faces off against Tatsuya Nakadai, a samurai he has defeated. And since Mifune has also outsmarted him, Nakadai’s honor is at stake. He requests a duel. Mifune makes a half-hearted attempt to talk him out of it, but fails. The men are inches apart. While nine other men look on from a very close distance, Mifune and Nakadai stare into each other’s eyes. The seconds seem like minutes.

In an interview with the Criterion Channel (below), Nakadai describes how the duel was set up and then we see the big reveal.

In this excerpt from a program on the Criterion Channel, the great Japanese actor recounts his experience shooting a scene in Akira Kurosawa's SANJURO.