Powell and Pressburger

Homages, Ripoffs, and Coincidences: Mark Lewis vs. Hugo Cabret

Carl Boehm, who played Mark in the film, was very upset by the reception it got. When we saw him, years later, for dinner, he would still say, ‘What happened? Why was it so badly received?’ Michael was much more able to understand that, I think. But then he fell into those terrible, terrible years of not being able to work, at the same age as Marty is now. Can you imagine? If Marty were suddenly told tomorrow, ‘You can’t make any more movies’? It’s just terrifying.

After the Edinburgh Festival, Marty finally found Michael in London and had a meal with him in Soho, and Michael said that it was as if he were waking from a nightmare, from those years of oblivion. He writes in his book: ‘The blood started to course in my veins again. This young fast-talking director knew everything I’d ever made and had a zillion questions about how I did it.’ It was terribly moving. So Marty raced back to America and said, ‘I’ve found him, I’ve found him! Bring him to the Telluride Film Festival, we’ll enter Peeping Tom in the New York Film Festival’, and it was a huge hit there. It was as if a bomb went off. People like Francis Coppola saw it for the first time, and Marty put up his own money to partially fund the re-release of the movie.

I wasn’t around then, but shortly after that, when Marty and I were working on Raging Bull, he started showing me the films of Michael Powell, which he does with anyone he cares about. Actors who start working with him for the first time are usually bombarded with DVDs of Michael’s films. And, at one point, he said, ‘Well, as you love his films so much, maybe you should meet him. He’s coming for dinner tonight.’

So I met Michael and fell in love with him immediately. He was such an extraordinary person. Even though he was 30 years older than me, he was so vibrant. His love of life was just written all over his face. He had these startling blue eyes, and when he spoke - and he didn’t speak a lot - whatever came out was so interesting and unusual and unclichéd, and always fresh. I was just stunned by him, but he didn’t know that. He came back and talked to me in the editing room for a bit. And then he would sometimes call, late at night, because he knew we worked very late and he liked to talk to Marty, and sometimes Marty wouldn’t be in the room and I would talk to him a bit.

When Marty and I went to LA for the Oscars that year, Michael was there at Zoetrope, which was Francis Coppola’s ill-fated experiment in independent cinema. Francis had asked Michael to be senior director in residence, because he had always loved Michael’s films, particularly The Thief of Bagdad. Michael and I started having lunch, and then we started having dinner and things began to develop between us, and, in 1980, he moved to New York to live with me when we started The King of Comedy, our next movie.

I have heard that Michael could be pretty rough on the set. He felt filmmaking was like a religion, and when you came on his set you had damned well better be ready and do the best possible job for him, and if you didn’t he could be merciless. I never saw that myself; you see, with me it was a different thing. But I’ve been told stories by actors of his bad behaviour towards them. Dirk Bogarde once said to me, at a dinner in Paris, after Michael had died, ‘You knew his cruelty?’ and I said, ‘No, I didn’t’. I never did.

Michael taught me a lot about love. He understood love in a way I think very few people do, and that was a great gift to me. It keeps me going now; it’s like a little furnace burning inside me. Scorsese and I learnt so much from Michael about filmmaking. He taught us always to be ahead of the audience - not to explain too much - and never to talk down to them. We learnt to be bolder in our films and not be afraid if maybe the audience didn’t understand everything.

Michael also taught Marty that you don’t need the beginning, middle and end of every scene - usually you can do without the beginning, just plunge right into the middle, and sometimes you don’t need the end either. Every shot in Michael’s movies taught Marty something - he so admired the acting in the films, the humour, the emotion, the dazzling style, the use of colour and the fearlessness, the absolute fearlessness.

Horatia Harold, 2007

Thelma Schoonmaker and Michael Powell on their wedding day in 1984

Actually, Kingsley resembles the late, great English director Michael Powell (The Red Shoes), who, like Méliès, was another movie genius past his prime and nearly forgotten until Scorsese resurrected his reputation. So it should come as no surprise that Scorsese would find a way of connecting Powell to Méliès in this valentine to French cinema.

Scorsese even played matchmaker by setting up Powell romantically with his friend Thelma Schoonmaker, A.C.E., who became Powell’s bride and Scorsese’s longtime editor. She has collaborated with Scorsese on more than 20 projects over a career spanning 44 years, editing every feature film of his since Raging Bull (1980), for which she won her first Oscar. In fact, with her subsequent Academy Awards for cutting two other Scorsese films (2004’s The Aviator and 2006’s The Departed), Schoonmaker is in a four-way tie for the most Oscar-laden picture editor with Michael Kahn, A.C.E., Ralph Dawson and Daniel Mandell.

“Hugo has deep resonance for Marty because it’s about a great filmmaker who has fallen on hard times and is forgotten,” Schoonmaker tells Editors Guild Magazine. “Marty has restored the reputations of so many filmmakers––mainly my late husband’s––and the film is a wonderful distillation of that. But, of course, that is why he was drawn to the story in the first place; the chance to show this genius, who is thrown aside, and then to show his greatness.”

Everything about Hugo is influenced by Powell, particularly the emotion and the portrayal of silent cinema, which obviously had a powerful influence on the English filmmaker. “All of Michael’s special effects people were trained by Méliès, the inventor of special effects,” she continues. “He always talked to me about them, like Papa Day, who worked on Thief of Bagdad and so many others. It was just wonderful for me to see again what Méliès’ great genius was all about.”

Schoonmaker cites a scene in Hugo as an example: “An explosion occurs and people disappear, and Méliès shows you exactly how that was done. Well, you look at Red Shoes and Anton Walbrook looking at himself in the mirror and smashing his hand in the mirror. It was [a substitution trick] done exactly the same way. So it’s this wonderful echo that’s going on.”

Thelma Schoonmaker and the Movie Magic of ‘Hugo’

I was at last night’s screening of Blimp at Film Forum wiht Martin Scorcese introducing, and I got there early to get a good seat. It’s a small cinema and I knew there’d be a line. I asked the few peiple who were standing nearby if they’d come to see Blimp, and all of them knew nothing about the film. They’d come because Marty was introducing it and wanted to see him! But at least they got to see the film as a bonus!
 Before Marty there was a short film presentation on the restoration given by a woman whose name I forget. They showed several before and after clips and went into quite some detail discussing the state the print was found in and the amount of work required to restore. They showed before and after clips of the German beer hall scene and the difference was truly striking. I want to go back and look at my DVD, because even there it such a visually arresting scene, but the estoration was magnificent. The bright blue coats of new guests walking in, the brilliant red of the skirt of the woman pouring the beers.
I forget some of what Marty said. I kept taking mental notes, but when the film started, I was lost and forgot most of it. This is the first time I’ve ever seen him, so if I’m repeating what he’s said a dozen times, apologies. He told a story about how he and Robert DeNiro were talking about ways to tradically transform his physical form for Raging Bull, where he gains large amounts of weight, and so naturally Blimp came up in the discussions. DeNiro said he’d like to talk to Michael Powell about what Roger Livesey went through, and so Marty asked MP to dinner one night, telling him he wanted to introduce him to DeNiro. About halfway through the dinner, MP, who was sitting next to Marty, leaned over and whispered, “I thought you said DeNiro was gioing to be here?” Of course, he was, he was sitting on the other side of MP, but was so self-effacing in public he virtually disappeared. DeNiro did get to ask MP about the Livesey’s transformation, but all Marty claims MP said was,  “It’s called acting.” (Isn’t Gielguld or someone also supposed to have said that to DeNiro about Raging Bull?).
Marty also talked about his own first experiences watching Blimp, the buthchered 90-minute version in black and white on TV in the 50s. He said he saw this again, in color, in the late 70s, and talked about the reconstitution of the film back to its original 163-minute form for the 1983 version. It was these negatives, if I remember rightly, that were used as the basis of the restoration.
 Well, the restoration! I always thought the DVD looked really fine, with sharp, bright colors and excellent sound, and wondered if a restoration was even needed, but this new version is something else. Some of the moments were a pure revelation. For example, when Clive walks into the convent at Bonne Amie (sp?) the quality of light when he first sees the rows of nurses is astonishing. There are some close-ups of Deborah Kerr’s face when she becomes luminous, and the play of emotion is tangible. There was moment after moment which came alive in a new way, and that’s hard to do for a movie that is, well, so alive in the first place. Also, the sound restoration was beautiful. I was there with a friend who had never seen it before, and was awestruck at the end. The man sitting beside me let out a loud “Wow” when the end credits began rolling, and there were similar exclamations from other audience members, and the credits were met by a round of applause. So I think Marty drawing in the unknowing New York crowds did a great service by introducing this movie to many who would never have seen it otherwise.

Ranbir

Wise Guys

Martin Scorsese once said that Michael Powell, his late friend and mentor, is the key to understanding his theology. He frequently mentions Powell’s The Red Shoes as one of his favorite films, and like so many of Scorsese’s own works, that film concerns the concept of the God-given vocation. Carl Jung said that vocation “destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths.” Like William Blake, Jung sees vocation as a law of God from which there is no escape, and the one who is called “must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths.” “Why do you want to dance?” Boris Lermontov asks Vickie at the beginning of The Red Shoes. “Why do you want to live?” is her reply. In Hans Andersen’s fairy tale, the red shoes symbolize sexuality. In Powell’s film they represent Vickie’s passion, her calling, her entire being. Lermontov uncompromisingly considers his art “a religion,” and Scorsese has admitted that he feels a kinship with him to the point where he dreams about him at night on a regular basis. Like Scorsese, Lermontov believes that however painful a divine calling may be, refusing it is infinitely more excruciating.

oldhollywood:

Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes (1948, dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger)

“My father took me to see this film in 1950, when I was eight years old. And I’ve never forgotten it. I wouldn’t know how to begin to explain what this film has meant to me over the years. It’s about the joy and exuberance of film-making itself. It’s one of the true miracles of film history.

What keeps nourishing me over the years is the spell the film casts, how it weaves the mystery of the obsession of creativity, of the creative drive. It all comes down to that wonderful exchange early in the film when Anton Walbrook confronts Moira Shearer at a cocktail party. ‘Why do you want to dance?’ he asks, and she answers, ‘Why do you want to live?’ The look on his face is extraordinary.’

Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about that exchange. It expresses so much about the burning need for art – the mystery of the passion to create. It’s not that you want to do it, it’s that you have to do it. You have no choice. You have to live it and it comes with a price. But what a time paying it.”

-Martin Scorsese (2009)

His first impressions of ‘The Red Shoes’
‘When did it catch on here in New York? 1950? So I must have been eight or nine. I remember abstract impressions of colour and movement. Later, it became a very intense psychological vortex of passion, like a whirlpool sucking in the lives and souls of these characters. I was intrigued by the obsession, the need to dance. To be an artist. I guess it all comes down to that wonderful exchange early in the film when Anton Walbrook confronts Moira Shearer at a cocktail party. “Why do you want to dance?” he asks, and she answers, “Why do you want to live?” There’s no choice about it. The look on his face is extraordinary.’

How the film inspires him
‘Over the years, if I’ve found myself weakening, it’s not that I summon up the exact atmosphere and experience of seeing “The Red Shoes”, but that determined state of mind has definitely become part of who I am. I feel that this movie has given myself and plenty of other filmmakers the courage to keep going. It’s about directing. But it’s also about a dedication to what you do. You may not do it well [laughs], you may do it very well. But no matter what it is, you have to do it. And often, that’s a dangerous thing, not only to you, but to the people around you.’

The magic of the film’s colour
‘No, the colour in the movie isn’t realistic. But it reflects the heightened world of the ballet, of theatre. Colour is always something that is going to be an aesthetic comment, no matter how you do it. When you see “The Red Shoes” from the centre of the tenth row, you get submerged in a kind of reality, so to speak. You see these extraordinary close-ups of these people’s faces, with this amazing make-up on their eyes and red, red lipstick. It’s so blunt. Halfway through our screening at Cannes, the audience spontaneously applauded. I’ve never seen the print looking this good.’

How ‘The Red Shoes’ influenced ‘Raging Bull’
‘The movie hasn’t inspired me shot by shot. But the idea of whether your determination is going to take you off the cliff and you perish? That’s “Raging Bull”. It’s funny: when Michael Powell saw some 8mm test footage of De Niro sparring in 1978 or ’79, he said, “You know, it’s interesting, this sparring, but there’s one thing wrong.” I said, “What’s that?” He said, “The red boxing gloves are too red.” I said, “You’re absolutely right.” That was one of the reasons we decided to make it black-and-white.’

Why I still champion Michael Powell
‘“Peeping Tom” destroyed Michael Powell’s career, and I helped get that film re-released. There was a dismissal of his work. A great deal of it had to do with the style of filmmaking coming out of England in the 1960s, excellent pictures like “This Sporting Life”. A new realism, yes, but the filmmakers had to eschew what came before them – a shame. We went about reclaiming those films. I even had an Anton Walbrook (who plays the Russian ballet master in “The Red Shoes”) Cossack shirt – yes, a velvet one. I still have it [laughs]. It’s a little warm. I think it had to do with the lack of central heating in England.’

(via)

There were scenes in ‘Shutter Island’ that made me think of Powell’s ‘Black Narcissus’ and his ‘I Know Where I’m Going’.
‘Exactly. The coastal elements. And the cliff scene in “Black Narcissus”. Literally, there were some shots in the film when we said, “Right, let’s have the ‘Black Narcissus’ effect here!”

Martin Scorsese talks ‘Shutter Island’

Seventy years ago there were men like D.W. Griffith and seventy years later - now - there are not many men like Martin Scorsese. But so long as there is one there will be others, and the art of the cinema will survive. - Michael Powell

In honor of Martin Scorsese tumblelog