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Ray Pride

By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Hou's coming to dinner: the key point is how to observe

Xinhua has words with Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien, whose intensely well-reviewed Three Times will be released soon as part of IFC’s “First Take” series. What kinds of movies do audiences want? he’s asked. “Simple, touching and powerful movies are always most welcome.” Hou appeared at a Wednesday seminar of the Hong Kong International Film Festival. 3xhou.jpg“Movies are divided into two groups: good and bad. A good movie should be simple and touching, and in the meantime, it must be powerful. It’s most difficult to make a powerful movie because truth is usually beyond words and images… Personal style is not opposite to the market. What you shoot is life and the society. Your own experience also reflect and express others’ experience. Why you say ‘I can’t understand’ is just because of the habit of movie-watching is being changed.” “Hou has kept shooting films that require audience to think all these years. He believes that such films can inject fresh blood to the movie industry and finally make an impact on the mainstream. “Since these films are of low cost, they are courageous enough to experiment and produce something creative. Hollywood movies are always ready to pick up those fresh elements,” Hou said. Any worries about DV, which allows almost anyone to shoot and produce a movie? “The films they shoot are always based on others’ imagination. They are so alike to what they have watched in the theaters. They do not feel the life with their own hearts. They do not watch the society with their own eyes… It’s quite easy to grasp shooting techniques, but the key point is how to observe.”

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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