MCN Blogs
Ray Pride

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Wednesday, March 15th, 2006 - Comments Off on Claire Denis: I have no choice. I’m outside. That’s my fate
Be Sociable, Share!

Claire Denis: I have no choice. I’m outside. That’s my fate

claire_denis.jpgClaire Denis‘ brilliant, lyrical, elusive L’intrus is making its Los Angeles debut as Wellspring wheezes its last theatrical gasps; in LA WEEKLY, Scott Foundas finally gets to publish his 2004 Toronto interview with the great director. Of the film’s three locations: “Tahiti was this dream Southern island — I didn’t know it would be Tahiti for sure, but I knew it was going to be like Gauguin’s paintings, and Gauguin described with such strength a place of the world that is in fact not a paradise. His paintings were misunderstood: Gauguin never painted a paradise. He painted a culture that was more than open sex, sunshine, fruit, and fish. The French-Swiss borderland, that I knew from childhood — one of my aunts used to live there and we were crossing the border very often. Also, it’s very wild, with beautiful forests and lakes — you can hide there. Korea I had been to, and in the script I had this in-between country where Louis is buying the boat, a sort of limbo between inferno and paradise.” Her movies are very different from American ones. “You know, what is so attractive for me, being French, about American cinema, is this complete, solid American-ness — that American cinema is built solidly like a house with solid walls, and concentrates on what is inside the house. f2.jpgIt makes American filmmakers sometimes so attractive and their films so attractive, because they’re so concentrated that they diffuse a sort of strength and power and reality. But on the other hand, it’s striking sometimes about some American directors — they might go to festivals and I see in their eyes how open they are to other cultures, but they would not take the risk to go outside with their cameras and film other people. Maybe they’re right in a way, because they make more solid films. Films like mine are maybe fragile in a way, more porous, more open. Sometimes, I would like to be in a more solid position, to be inside the fortress. But I have no choice. I’m outside. That’s my fate.”

Be Sociable, Share!

Comments Off on Claire Denis: I have no choice. I’m outside. That’s my fate

Comments are closed.

Movie City Indie

Comments Most Recent Archives

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon