Summer/time

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Some images that have me thinking about summer and warm weather:

#1: David Hockney’s Picture of a Hollywood Swimming Pool, 1964. Image courtesy of MNZ

#2: A still of Cairo from one of my favorite tumblrs, picturemasr.

#3: A still from A River Runs Through It (1992, dir. Robert Redford).  I stumbled upon this film while channel-surfing the other night.  I really liked it the first time I saw it (back in 1992!) and it completely held up to my recollection.  While I’ve never fly-fished in my life, so many aspects of this film remind me of my childhood summers - its languid pace, the protective relationship between Norm and his brother, Paul (I have a younger brother), and the feeling of waiting for your life to actually start.

Hope you’re having a sweet weekend.

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“
We are a species driven by narrative and art is storytelling. We need to tell stories. We need to tell stories to pass along ideas and information and to try and make sense out of all this chaos. And sometimes, when you get a really good artist and a compelling story, you can almost achieve that thing that’s almost impossible which is entering the consciousness of another human being…so the experience is transformative.
Steven Soderbergh on storytelling
I recently came across this production still from one of my favorite Jacques Demy films, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).  I’ve written about this film before but thought this still was especially pertinent for the current Cannes Film Festival. A film print restoration of Umbrellas was just completed and will be screened in the Cannes Classics section this year. How I wish I could see this! The Umbrellas of Cherbourg won the Palme d’Or nearly 50 years ago. Mathieu Demy, Jacques’ son, had this to say about his father’s film:  “It evokes my childhood with my family. It’s a film I’ve seen hundreds of times with my father. It brings back childhood memories, when Jacques would project his films while we were on holiday. As I have grown older, I have learned to see the film differently: it is an incredible film that is totally original.” You can read the rest of Mathieu’s interview here. Follow me on Twitter View high resolution

I recently came across this production still from one of my favorite Jacques Demy films, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964).  I’ve written about this film before but thought this still was especially pertinent for the current Cannes Film Festival.

A film print restoration of Umbrellas was just completed and will be screened in the Cannes Classics section this year. How I wish I could see this! The Umbrellas of Cherbourg won the Palme d’Or nearly 50 years ago. Mathieu Demy, Jacques’ son, had this to say about his father’s film: 

“It evokes my childhood with my family. It’s a film I’ve seen hundreds of times with my father. It brings back childhood memories, when Jacques would project his films while we were on holiday. As I have grown older, I have learned to see the film differently: it is an incredible film that is totally original.”

You can read the rest of Mathieu’s interview here.

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Woody Allen on his film, Match Point:  “The movie expresses my philosophy to a T. I’ve always been a huge believer in luck. I think that people hate to admit the enormous part that luck plays in life because it means that much of life is out of our control. You’re always running into people who say, “I make my own luck.” And hard work, of course, is important. But in the end you have to have a lot of luck, in your relationships, in your career, with your health, and a million different ways that render all the searching and hard work and practicing and praying and anything else you care to do to in some way influence your life – render it slightly meaningless. That’s always been a great philosophy of mine.”   Still from Match Point (2005) View high resolution

Woody Allen on his film, Match Point: 

“The movie expresses my philosophy to a T. I’ve always been a huge believer in luck. I think that people hate to admit the enormous part that luck plays in life because it means that much of life is out of our control. You’re always running into people who say, “I make my own luck.” And hard work, of course, is important. But in the end you have to have a lot of luck, in your relationships, in your career, with your health, and a million different ways that render all the searching and hard work and practicing and praying and anything else you care to do to in some way influence your life – render it slightly meaningless. That’s always been a great philosophy of mine.”

 

Still from Match Point (2005)

“When I’m working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm. Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won’t go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting. At the end of the day, I mark up the pages I’ve done—pages or page—all the way back to page one. I mark them up so that I can retype them in the morning. It gets me past that blank terror.” - Joan Didion on her writing process

“When I’m working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm. Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won’t go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting. At the end of the day, I mark up the pages I’ve done—pages or page—all the way back to page one. I mark them up so that I can retype them in the morning. It gets me past that blank terror.”

- Joan Didion on her writing process

“I don’t think so much about verbal comedy. I always think about visual comedy. I was raised watching silents, and I’m always thinking about how to make cinema, not good talking—although I want good talking. I’m much more interested in framing, composition, and orchestration of bodies in space, and so forth. My goal is always what Chuck Jones wanted his Warner Brothers cartoons to be, which was if you turn down the sound, you could still tell what’s going on. I think if you watch most of my films with the sound off, you could still tell what’s going on.” — Alexander Payne on visual comedy Still from The Descendants (2011, dir. Alexander Payne) View high resolution

“I don’t think so much about verbal comedy. I always think about visual comedy. I was raised watching silents, and I’m always thinking about how to make cinema, not good talking—although I want good talking. I’m much more interested in framing, composition, and orchestration of bodies in space, and so forth. My goal is always what Chuck Jones wanted his Warner Brothers cartoons to be, which was if you turn down the sound, you could still tell what’s going on. I think if you watch most of my films with the sound off, you could still tell what’s going on.”

— Alexander Payne on visual comedy

Still from The Descendants (2011, dir. Alexander Payne)

Happy Mother’s Day. Henri Matisse, Mother and Child, 1949.

Happy Mother’s Day.

Henri Matisse, Mother and Child, 1949.

Gesture. Composition. 

Henri Matisse, Gray Dress with Violet Stripes, 1942.

A still from Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere, 2010.

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“The shooting script I handed in was 81 pages, and from then on, Ryan and I and the other actors just started eliminating lines while we were shooting…We would meet every morning, whoever was in the scene, and we would say, “You wanna say this? You wanna say that? You wanna say this? You wanna say that?” And a lot of the time, I would always go for “less is more”…I love the language of silence. Like the character in Vanishing Point who is essentially also very existentialist in his silence…Ryan was very much seeing The Driver as a man who wouldn’t have a conversation unless he meant to have one, so you eliminated all small talk automatically. That, of course, was a great way to take everything out that had to do with that, which is unnecessary anyway, just filler that you don’t need. People talk nowadays like it’s the end of the world. We don’t do radio plays or plays. We do movies, which is about what you see. Or what you don’t see.”

— Nicholas Winding Refn on changing his script for Drive

Stills from Drive (2011)

“If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.” — Billy Wilder Still of Billy Wilder on the set of The Apartment (1960) with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon View high resolution

“If you’re going to tell people the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.”

— Billy Wilder

Still of Billy Wilder on the set of The Apartment (1960) with Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon