When an artist, particularly a popular artist creates a work, it is not a matter of them creating something which we can then encounter or not. There is a constant collaboration back and forth, a synthesis of preconceptual stuff that is exchanged. The artist creates tentative forms that will be received by us and affect us, and to do that he has to enlist our help as cocreator.
It is a complex business and the rules are always changing. No one fully understands what is going on, so usually intuition is what everyone relies on. Movies are more complex than other art forms, and they are younger by a far stretch. No decent film theorist has yet emerged.
Even with the high cost of production, there is so much money in the game that there is lots of room for trial and error. And that's how things happen.
How quickly we forget that all of our celebrated filmmakers, especially those featured here, had some really, really big failures. And until these dogs were sent out, they thought they were as terrific as the things that we now endorse.
The point is that when it comes to explaining things, these might be the very last people to ask, and whose answers may be the least trustworthy.
Yes, it probably helps to know what Scorsese now thinks was in his mind when he did something thirty years ago. And it is useful to know some of the factual history about funding and who introduced whom.
But none of that gets us closer to understanding film in the 70s. No one knows what the stock market is doing, but everyone seems to have a plausible explanation afterward.
I know that Hopper and Schrader have more interesting opinions than expressed here I've heard them. Those opinions are of the type I credit and have to do with constructed reality. But none of that will be found in this high school level discussion.
Look, these are professional storytellers. They've been explaining themselves all their lives, so they've constructed plausible stories about what happened and why. You can't see it here, but if you dig deeper into individual views, you'll find that each person's vision of the real world corresponds to that of the constructed worlds they create.
Scorsese believes the whole world is spun by personality. Schrader believes that drug-addled artists can stumble upon an accidental creation if their passion is great enough. Hopper's world is one in which a noir fate simply lays accidents of insight here and there, and so on.
Demme was the wrong man to ask these questions. Of major American filmmakers, only one has exhibited his independence from the internal/external trap: Woody Allen. When he does something like this, we should all listen. Meanwhile, stuff like this only confuses history and understanding.
Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
