Every now and then you have to quit bitching and moaning and shout your love for something. Being a filmmaker, movies have always “spoken to me”. I adore it as a form of storytelling. It’s so easy to get wrong. Soooooo easy.
But when a movie is right. It lives inside your head. It’s the storytelling and the look and the characters and the dialogue and the music and the casting and even the greens and set dec — it’s all sublime. There are lots of “directors” but only a handful of artists. I’ve had the pleasure of working with an artist — Bob Zemeckis.
In a way, Bob’s an “artist of the impossible”.
Bob was one of my Executive Producers when I did Tales From The Crypt for HBO. I wrote most of the episodes he directed. For starters, he is an incredible collaborator. He truly knows how to get the very best out of everyone he works with. Which is where the “impossible” comes in. At some point, in a Zemeckis piece, there’s going to be at least one shot that — if you’re looking and realize you’re watching it — is impossible. Meaning — yeah, the shot’s there in the movie but how the hell did they get it? It’s impossible!
When I was a young buck, a terrific documentary filmmaker I had the honor to know — Greg Shuker — turned me on to Nicolas Roeg’s “Don’t Look Now” — a psychological thriller starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.
I don’t want to give away a great ending but — that the ending works as effectively as it does, that it’s as memorable as it is — it’s a testament to the masterful work director Nic Roeg has done up till then.
Water plays heavily. The color red, too. Sutherland plays John, an art restorer preparing for a project he’s about to start in Venice, Italy. He and Christie’s Laura own a farm out in the country where their two young children are playing on a rainy day. Their young daughter drowns in the pond — something her father “senses”. He rushes outside but too late. He pulls her body — clad in its red mac — from the pond with a doleful wail.
It’s a few months later. They’ve buried their child. Their son is at boarding school as the restoration project in Venice begins. On their first night, Laura and John make love (for the first time since their daughter died) then go out to dinner. At the next table are two elderly English sisters. One is blind. They happen to be in the ladies’ room when Laura enters.
The blind sister is psychic. She says she’s seen Laura and John’s daughter. She was happy. Laughing. Laura is blown away. She doesn’t know what to think. But John — when Laura tells him — thinks it’s all nonsense and wishful thinking.
And yet. As the movie goes on, John begins to catch glimpses of a fleeing figure in red. Is it the spirit of his daughter — or something else?
Roeg was a director of photography before sliding into the director’s chair. His films look great. He captures Venice’s wateriness — its dullness. Its greyness and fog. He captures the feeling one gets — being there — of wandering in circles — hopelessly lost. But the Roeg’s real genius as a director was in how he cut. He had a way of intercutting two scenes that no one else could touch.
An excellent example — the scene where John and Laura make love for that first time since their daughter’s death. Roeg intercuts the sex — which is very intimate (there have always been stories that the sex between Christie and Sutherland was real) — with John and Laura, post-coital, get ready to go out for dinner. You really get the feeling that they’re a couple — which makes the sex we keep intercutting back to feel more organic and real.
For my money, the sex scene in Don’t Look Now is one of the best 2 or 3 sex scenes in all of movie history (the caveat being that most sex scenes suck). And — here’s the kicker — it’s between a married couple. That’s a sex scene you never see — between married people.
Nic Roeg died a few months ago. I still owe Greg Shuker — for introducing him to me.
