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Ray Pride

Pride By Ray PridePride@moviecitynews.com

DVD Interview: Ang Lee On Water

By Ray Pride - Monday, March 11th, 2013

“I think nature is a great tool to visualize internal feelings, I am dramatically trained, not visually trained. All of these images come from what I need to express how the characters feel. It all came from there, hardly anything is purely visual [in a way] that I cannot explain why it came to me. It’s not like that. Because you feel peaceful, so you have this, it feels loss, so he has that. In turmoil, so you have the storm. It’s all about something. I admire people who just envision something, like the pen takes their hand to draw. My older son is like that, just drawing, I don’t know how people do that. To just draw. I am not like that, I am drama.”

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DVD Interview: Benh Zeitlin on Water

By Ray Pride - Monday, March 11th, 2013

“There’s a real humility that comes from this sort of feeling when you are there, that New Orleans is very close to death in this way. It’s a presence in a way that I have never experienced anywhere else before, and it is all about… Every time it rains, water has this reminder of what it can do, and that your existence is this precarious thing that can be taken anyway at any moment by the water. Then at the same time it’s also where all the best food comes from! It’s an endlessly fascinating relationship and when I started making this film, I saw this. You look at a map, and you see this place where the water and the land are sewn together, where there is no clear border. And I wanted to explore what was at the frontlines of that place. So I would drive as far as I could go out into the marsh on all these different roads, and at the end of one of these roads was the town that became the film.”

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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