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Conversations with the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood's Golden Age
George Stevens Jr.
At the American Film Institue
Conversations at the American Film Institute
Knopf
February 2006
On Sale: February 1, 2006
736 pages ISBN: 140004054X EAN: 9781400040544 Kindle: B000SEH37G Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
The first book to bring together these interviews of
master moviemakers from the American Film Institute's
renowned seminars--a series that has been in existence for
almost forty years, since the founding of the Institute
itself.
Here are the legendary directors, producers,
cinematographers and writers--the great pioneers, the great
artists--whose work led the way in the early days of
moviemaking and still survives from what was the twentieth
century's art form. The book is edited--with
commentaries--by
George Stevens, Jr., founder of the American Film Institute
and the AFI Center for Advanced Film Studies' Harold Lloyd
Master Seminar series.
Here talking about their work,
their art--picture making in general--are directors from King
Vidor, Howard Hawks and Fritz Lang ("I learned only from bad
films") to William Wyler, George Stevens and David
Lean.
Here, too, is Hal Wallis, one of Hollywood's
great motion picture producers; legendary cinematographers
Stanley Cortez, who shot, among other pictures, The
Magnificent Ambersons, Since You Went Away and Shock
Corridor and George Folsey, who was the cameraman on
more than 150 pictures, from Animal Crackers and
Marie Antoinette to Meet Me in St. Louis and
Adam's Rib; and the equally celebrated James Wong
Howe.
Here is the screenwriter Ray Bradbury, who
wrote the script for John Huston's Moby Dick,
Fahrenheit 451 and The Illustrated Man, and
the admired Ernest Lehman, who wrote the screenplays for
Sabrina, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and
North by Northwest ("One day Hitchcock said, 'I've
always wanted to do a chase across the face of Mount
Rushmore.'").
And here, too, are Ingmar Bergman and
Federico Fellini ("Making a movie is a mathematical
operation. It's absolutely impossible to
improvise").
These conversations gathered
together--and published for the first time--are full of
wisdom, movie history and ideas about picture making, about
working with actors, about how to tell a story in words and
movement.
A sample of what the moviemakers have to
teach us:
Elia Kazan, on translating a play to the
screen: "With A Streetcar Named Desire we worked
hard to open it up and then went back to the play because
we'd lost all the compression. In the play, these people
were trapped in a room with each other. As the story
progressed I took out little flats, and the set got smaller
and smaller."
Ingmar Bergman on writing: "For half a
year I had a picture inside my head of three women walking
around in a red room with white clothes. I couldn't
understand why these damned women were there. I tried to
throw it away... find out what they said to each other
because they whispered. It came out that they were watching
another woman dying. Then the screenplay started--but it took
about a year. The script always starts with a
picture..."
Jean Renoir on actors: "The truth is, if you
discourage an actor you may never find him again. An actor
is an animal, extremely fragile. You get a little
expression, it is not exactly what you wanted, but it's
alive. It's something human."
And Hitchcock--on
Hitchcock: "Give [the audience] pleasure, the same pleasure
they have when they wake up from a nightmare."
Conversations at the American Film Institute
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