In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture turning it into Pop art and camp had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars.
I was a hip kid. When I saw Bambi it was the midnight show.
My favorite actress of all times is Bette Davis in Dark Victory. I have seen it six or seven times, and I still cry.
I shot film with the Coen brothers on 'Hail, Caesar!' That's fine. I'm sentimental about film; I've shot film for forty years or something.
My cinema - the '50s, '60s - is different from the cinema today so I thought that it would not be bad to show that kind of cinema where we could dream.
It's deliberate that a lot of my films have been period pieces.
In the '80s, I loved the movies of the '70s. Also I remember loving Klute [1971]. I loved Jane Fonda. Actually, I auditioned for the last movie she made before she retired for a while, Stanley and Iris [1990], which Martha Plimpton got.
I still love the layers of cinema whether it's 35mm or 16mm or 8mm, super 8 which I love. I love the grain. If I had my druthers I'd film everything in kodachrome.
When I was little it was a great time for film-making, with stuff like Mike Nichols' 'Silkwood.' The films you see in that pre-secondary-school stage stay with you in a very particular way.
I know Camberwell very well: I used to go to Camberwell New Baths a lot and the cinema, which used to be the Odeon. My old school is around there too, though you've got to understand that I went to a lot of schools.
Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.
The first movie I can remember ever seeing was Hard Times with Charles Bronson and James Coburn. My dad also introduced me to the likes of Jimmy Cagney... John Garfield... Robert Ryan... Steve McQueen... James Caan... Those are my fondest memories.
I love movies; many an afternoon skipping school were spent in a funky, run-down Brooklyn movie theater.
I prefer the old theaters because the audience is... trapped.
I started 'Carol' as I almost always do, by looking at films from the time, and they were less - they actually felt less relevant to me in terms of their bigness, although we do have some big '50s-type moments in 'Carol.'
I had never seen the classics with Molly Ringwald, like 'Pretty in Pink' or 'Sixteen Candles,' or '80s horror, like 'Poltergeist,' 'Close Encounters,' and 'Nightmare on Elm Street.' I went back and watched all of those.
There are no “old” movies-only movies you have already seen and ones you haven't.
I grew up watching a lot of Italian and French movies, so I want to have that '70s look, in my dream movie. I want that thing that's not so much happening now, that's existentialist.
If I would rescue one of my movies, it would be 'A Little Princess.'
What I think happens today is that a lot of filmmakers look at other films that are retro pieces, like L.A. Confidential, and say, oh, that's period. We didn't want to do the stereotypical stuff.
Rick: Here's looking at you, kid.
I grew up with two sisters, and we owned three movies: 'Grease,' 'It's a Wonderful Life,' and 'Grease 2.' And you can only watch 'Wonderful Life' in the last half of the year. So I don't remember a time when I didn't know 'Grease.'
My access point to the '70s is films from that time, and they all have that paranoiac quality.
Everybody has this fond association with the car from Back to the Future, but most people have never seen one. I've seen people drive off the berm trying to take pictures. It ends up being dangerous.
Most filmmakers' entire body of knowledge is of other movies. When they describe things, they describe them in relation to other movies. That's why we have so many cyclical movies that look like other movies. But I'm not cynical. I even go to some of those movies.
