Cinema musings

Brains too, actually
Charles McGrath's Commanding Attention in or Out of Costume

A word Ms. Knightley uses often about herself is “obsessed.” “I’m quite obsessed with film,” she said. “I absolutely love watching it. I love knowing how movies are made, and I love being a part of them.” Over the course of lunch she rattled off half a dozen performances she had been studying lately, especially George Clooney and Tilda Swinton in “Michael Clayton,” Marion Cotillard in “La Vie en Rose” and Chazz Palminteri in “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.” But her most detailed commentary, oddly, was about some oldies, “On the Waterfront” for example.

“That scene with Rod Steiger and Marlon Brando in the back of the cab,” she said. “Amazing! Today you’d never hold that scene in a two-shot. You’d be in quite close, and you’d be constantly back and forth. But there the shot is always quite wide, and the atmosphere between the actors, because it’s so held back, is completely amazing. I got quite obsessed by it.”

She also talked about “Brief Encounter,” Noël Coward’s classic weeper, set in 1945, and “In Which We Serve,” Coward’s patriotic saga about the crew of a British destroyer, which she and the rest of the cast of “Atonement” watched, along with Mr. Wright, as part of their World War II homework.

“I was very aware of the American films of that period, but not the British ones,” she said. “I don’t know why that is, but I think it may have to do with the accent. It’s a bit jarring. You don’t hear that accent in Britain anymore. After the ’50s it suddenly became uncool to sound that posh.

“But it’s such an incredible style — virtually without pauses. Today’s style is sort of pseudonaturalism, but actually not at all. There are a lot of indulgent pauses and a very definite rhythm to the way we work, and then to watch these people — it’s like machine-gun fire, where we would have been so labored. They just steam through. I actually sort of prefer it. Very matter-of-fact and yet you totally feel it. It’s very liberating.”

She paused and then apologized for going on. “Sorry,” she said. “But if you’re going to be part of this business, I think you have to be a little bit like this. You have to be a bit obsessed.”

They're Germans too!
Nicholas Kulish's A Hand That Links Germans and Turks

Fatih Akin has earned the right to be a little exasperated about the constant focus on his Turkish-German identity.

“Imagine I’m a painter, and we speak more about the background of the paintings than the foreground of the paintings, or we speak about the framing but not about the painting,” said Mr. Akin, a German film director and the son of Turkish immigrants. “For sure this is frustrating, and for sure that’s why I will leave it behind sooner or later.” ...

Then came the surprise triumph of “Head-On,” which won the top prize, the Golden Bear, at the Berlin International Film Festival. Mr. Akin was unprepared for the celebrity it brought him in Germany as well as in Turkey. He was instantly seen as a cultural spokesman, far beyond his role as a filmmaker, to a large extent because of his Turkish roots, at a time when Germans were re-examining their complex relationship with their country’s large Muslim minority. About 2.7 million people of Turkish descent live in Germany today. ...

Brought over as so-called guest workers decades ago, most of the Turkish migrants never went home. But as a group they have not been embraced by mainstream German society

Imagine Hopper on a Lynch film
Dennis Lim's If You Need a Past, He’s the Guy to Build It

Mr. Fisk cited Edward Hopper’s famous painting of light-streaked storefronts, “Early Sunday Morning,” as an inspiration for the main street. The mansion he built in Mr. Malick’s “Days of Heaven” was modeled on “House by the Railroad,” another Hopper painting.

“Hopper would have been a great production designer,” Mr. Fisk said. “In art school I used to say, ‘Oh, Hopper, he’s just an illustrator,’ but he grows on you. He simplifies images, and that’s what production design is. If you understand the image immediately, it doesn’t take you away from the action.” ...

Mr. Fisk said his do-it-all approach might be a holdover from youthful diffidence. He landed his first art-directing gig (on the 1971 bikersploitation film “Angels Hard as They Come”) without a clear sense of the job description. “I was so scared of not doing what I was supposed to do that I did everything,” he said.

It was Mr. [David] Lynch who got Mr. Fisk his first job on a movie. Mr. Lynch, by then enrolled at the American Film Institute, had a job casting gold bricks from plaster on a western that was shooting in Utah. The work was so tedious that after a while he asked if his friend Jack could take over.

Recalling his first impression of Mr. Fisk at 14, Mr. Lynch said, “I thought he was a loser.” But they soon struck up a friendship. “In the whole high school we were basically the only artists,” Mr. Lynch recalled. “In this conservative world all we wanted to do was paint and live the art life.”

Photo of Keira Knightley from People