Tag: film-history

Even that film is linked to Jaws. After the monster success of Jaws, Spielberg was offered the chance to make a sequel, which he was actually tempted to do. The studio weren’t interested in his suggestions for the next instalment, though, so Spielberg declined. “He let other people do the sequels,” says McBride. “But then he felt bad because they were lousy. He felt protective of Jurassic Park, so he decided to make The Lost World.”

The Lost World failed to even match the box office of its predecessor, while it was also widely admonished by critics. The four subsequent additions to the franchise haven’t fared much better. Such is the genius of Jurassic Park, these below-par follow-ups haven’t damaged its legacy. Now it is regarded as the film that kick-started Hollywood’s reliance on visual effects.

Which makes it all the more surprising then that there are only 63 computer-generated effects in Jurassic Park, and it contains just six minutes of CGI dinosaurs. Instead, Spielberg used life-sized animatronic dinosaurs built by Stan Winston and his team, as well as his filmmaking acumen, to spellbind and captivate viewers.

“Jurassic Park is an incredible example of showing audiences exactly the right amount when you need to see it for maximum effectiveness,” remarks Kenilworth. “Another director might not have been able to get away with showing so few dinosaurs. But Spielberg’s track record meant that they trusted him.”

Unfortunately, when it comes to the use of visual effects, Spielberg’s approach of less-is-more hasn’t been followed by modern blockbusters. “A lot of modern action sequences are just mayhem,” says McBride. “Like Scorsese said a few years ago, the super-fast cutting disorients the viewer. It’s an assault on our consciousness to have images just smashing into each other from all different kinds of angles and not knowing where you are. With Spielberg, you always know where you are. He believes in characters and story. He knows that’s what matters and what is important.”

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As it happened, Puttnam and Forsyth had their eye on Lancaster to star in the film from get-go. “The first thing that Bill had said to me when he delivered the screenplay was, ‘I’d like Burt Lancaster to play Happer,” says Puttnam. While securing Lancaster was crucial for the film’s international appeal, this proved extremely difficult as the star’s salary took up half of the film’s budget. It took a year of negotiating to get him on board.

Despite considering stars such as Michael Douglas and Henry Winkler for the role of Mac, Forsyth was set on casting Peter Riegert as the oilman who experiences an awakening and succumbs to the charms of the rugged Scottish landscapes. For the key part of Oldsen, the local guide who escorts Mac around Ferness, Forsyth chose Peter Capaldi, a then fresh-faced Scottish actor just out of art school, with no credits to his name.

Another integral element of the film is the score by Scottish-born Dire Straits frontman Mark Knopfler, who Puttnam suggested to Forsyth. While it is regarded as a key component of the film, underscoring shots of the Scottish coastline and the Northern Lights, it almost never came about.

“I heard his (Dire Straits) album Making Movies. So, I wrote to him, I got a letter from his manager who said, ‘Oh, that’s really, really interesting’. I got Mark and Bill to meet, Bill didn’t like Mark’s music, so it was a very tense meeting. But Bill liked one track, Telegraph Road. So, I managed to have a meeting where the only track we talked about was Telegraph Road. And, in the end, they got to like each other and they got to work together,” says Puttnam.

Ahead of its time

Released to immediate acclaim, the film was a major success in the UK and in the US, going on to be honoured as one of the top 10 films of the year by the National Board of Review in New York and launching the career of future Doctor Who star and multi-Bafta winner Peter Capaldi. Forsyth – who’d garnered praise for his 1981 sleeper hit Gregory’s Girl – won a Bafta for best direction.

While Local Hero remains arguably the finest film to have come out of Scotland, perhaps its most enduring legacy lies in its prescient caution on the environment. Fully aware that going ahead with the oil plant will irrevocably damage their village, the locals of Ferness willingly agree to sell their land, rather than oppose the corporation – bar one holdout, a dogged old man.

Well before it was echoed in the incident of the Scottish farmer who refused to sell his land to Trump when he built his golf course, Forsyth’s film implored audiences to conserve the environment, to stand up and fight for it, and to contemplate how easily it can be destroyed.

In the willingness of the residents to sell their land, Forsyth urged viewers to consider the irreversible repercussions of environmental harm. Looking back on the seminal Scottish film 40 years later, Puttnam says he believes it was prescient and is his favourite of the films he has produced: “It was certainly a good 20 years ahead of its time.”

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However, Fellini’s film doesn’t simply portray the director in his moments of being the big man on set. Instead we have access to Guido’s dreams, as he is revisited by his dead parents, has visions of memories from his school days, and even imagines a fantastical harem where all of his previous love affairs and sexual conquests reside and eventually rebel against him. He is shown to be a deeply flawed, even troubled person, lacking the confidence his crisp suit suggests. But it’s a warm admission, with Fellini being refreshingly vulnerable in his openness.

In the end, the situating of a sincere, tender autobiography in such a cool, empty milieu raises questions as to what is real and what is fantasy. After all, two such differing worlds do not sit naturally together. “What I love about Fellini is that he was a liar,” Gilliam said in his original Close-Up interview, discussing in particular the portrayal of filmmaking. “He’s a constant liar. He twists and distorts the truth.” He elaborates further on this point today. “Fellini was a great liar and yet his lies were very close to the truth,” he adds, and in fact “a better truth than the facts!” His point being that filmmaking is such an absurd and surreal venture in the first place that it may as well be a strange dream.

Fellini’s world is still an illusion. As with magic, the film is a stylish sleight-of-hand, but the human reaction it inspires is very real and potent. “He took me down these passages,” Gilliam concludes “these ways of looking at the world and this is what I thought films were supposed to do, and many films just didn’t. He broke every rule there was to break. All the things you’re not supposed to do he did, and he made it all work!” Throwing away the cinematic rulebook was a radical but undeniably cool look.

But Fellini’s film ultimately shows that what matters is the beating heart beneath the modish exterior – and it is perhaps its air of fallible humanity, alongside its distinctly timeless style, that means Fellini’s film still feels cool today. If there was nothing beneath the sunglasses – Guido’s being an iconic pair of Prada SPR 07F like any good European jetsetter – then 60 years on, the film would surely ring hollow. 8 1/2 is arguably as much a portrait about simply being alive as it is about creativity. Perhaps Fellini’s final trick is portraying life as a kind of film of our own making, one we slip in and out of like a dream. And what illusion could really be cooler than that?

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However, if Le Doulos followed in US film noir’s footsteps, there were also striking ways in which it diverged from its template – in part with its sheer intricacy. As Vincendeau puts it the “traditional clarity of action of the American cinema is challenged head-on by Le Doulos’s complex plotting, ambiguity and withholding of information, right from frame one”. Characters cannot trust each other, much to the misfortune of virtually everyone in the film. Whereas American noir would clearly reprimand its equally devious characters to highlight its moral core, Melville’s persistent ambiguity feels deeply Gallic.

Another difference between Le Doulosand the American cinema it referenced was its explicit portrayal of violence. In one infamous scene, Silien visciously beats Maurice’s girlfriend (Monique Hennessy), ties her by the neck to a radiator and throws whiskey in her face before interrogating her. The blunt, uncompromising brutality is exactly the sort that would find wider purchase in later crime films, in America and in Europe. In 1962, however, it was a bolt from the blue.

Just as Le Doulos was inspired by the US crime cinema that preceded it, the film’s distinctly visceral, hyper-tense style had an equal influence on future US crime films in return. Indeed, Melville’s heady combination of moody tropes from classic US noir and the rawer French style, which mixed equally chic mise-en-scène with hints of documentary vividness, still holds a huge sway with American directors.

Martin Scorsese, for example, has cited Le Doulos as an influence. In preparation for filming The Irishman (2019), Scorsese screened it to his own director of photography Rodrigo Prieto. “For the tone of the movie, I wanted it to be contemplative and it had to be an intimate epic,” he told fellow director Spike Lee in an on-stage discussion around its release. “So I showed a couple of Jean-Pierre Melville films. I showed Le Doulos and Le deuxième soufflé. It’s a very different world, but I like the understatement of it.”

Tarantino is another high-profile admirer. When asked by interviewer Josh Becker about the inspirations for his 1992 debut film Reservoir Dogs, he replied: “It’s like the films of Jean-Pierre Melville, Bob le flambeur, Le Doulos, which is my favourite screenplay of all time, with Jean-Paul Belmondo; it’s fantastic.” Reservoir Dogs certainly borrowed Le Doulos’s style, but more specifically its finale is an echo of Melville’s, with a trio of men shooting each other dead, and all over a betrayal.

Le Doulos still stands today as one of the great crime films of the post-war years. In hindsight, it feels like a pivot point on which the crime films before and after turn, marking the genre’s transition from the melodramatic to coolly brutal. Pessimism on screen has never looked so good since; the city forever a lonely, rain-soaked place where death is waiting to collect and betrayal is always just around the corner.

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The strange thing is that the you-are-what-you-eat scene in Hannibal undoubtedly has what Waddell calls “the ick factor” – but it also prompts queasy laughter. Certain kinds of violence may be unambiguously distressing to see, but Lecter’s cranial canapés make audiences chuckle. At the end of The Silence of the Lambs, he bids Clarice (Jodie Foster) a suave farewell: “I do wish we could chat longer, but I’m having an old friend for dinner.” If he’d said he was going to torture and murder that “old friend”, it would have been abhorrent – but because the audience knows he’s planning to eat Dr Chilton (Anthony Heald), possibly with a nice Chianti, some embrace him as a devilish anti-hero.

Why can cannibalism be more humorous than other such outrages? “It should be the most unspeakable human crime,” explains Forshaw, “but it’s so alien to anything we know that we’re not sure how to react.” Cannibalism in films is unique because it sits right on the border between fact and fantasy, between the everyday violence of a crime thriller and the supernatural violence of a monster movie. It may happen in the real world, but it’s so rare and so appalling that it seems like the stuff of legend – so it can be terrifying and loathsome, but funny, too. For instance, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street features a witty duet in which Sweeney and Mrs Lovett discuss which professions make the tastiest pie fillings. And Forshaw’s favourite line on the topic comes from a 1976 comedy, The Big Bus: “You eat one lousy foot and they call you a cannibal. What a world!”

What’s even weirder is that some cannibal films don’t just have comic aspects, but erotic aspects, too. Bones and All and Fresh both revolve around cool, sexy characters played by pin-up actors, as does Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016). All of these films ponder the link between loving someone and feasting on them, between cannibalism and kinks and body modification. And, let’s not forget, one of these films is available on Disney’s own streaming service. Who knows, perhaps the ultimate taboo won’t be taboo for much longer.

Bones and All is released on 22 November.

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