David Thomson

David Thomson

To celebrate the publication of his new book The Whole Equation we were pleased to welcome to the NFT stage the man who is, according to The Independent, "The most obvious contender for the heavyweight title of best film critic in the world".

Interviewed Tuesday 15 February 2005 by Anthony Mighella

Interview © BFI 2005

Minghella on Thomson

Anthony Minghella: Good evening everybody. This is a great pleasure for me, for many reasons. I was saying to David that just over a year ago we were at Royce Hall in California where the boot was on the other foot and David interviewed me on the release of Cold Mountain [2003] and it made for an extraordinary evening. This is, of course, David Thomson, although I could ask some other David Thomsons in the audience to stand up and a Peter Thomson and a few other Thomsons. This is the David Thomson who is, without any doubt, the greatest writer on film there has ever been, in my opinion. And I have a book out, a book I haven't read - although it claims to be written by me - at the moment, edited by Tim Bricknell called Minghella on Minghella and to coincide with that publication I was asked to nominate my five favourite books on film, three of which were David's. So I think that gives you some sense of the regard in which I hold him as an authority, as an opinionated, weird, peculiar, beguiling writer about film. His Biographical Dictionary of Film is without any doubt the only essential book on film you need to have in your library. And I'm sure that most of you are here because you know that already. For those of you who are not familiar with David's writing, I thought it would be fun... I think that what happens and the one sympathy I have with him is that he's now on his... at least his second country of talking about this book - how many countries have you done so far?

David Thomson: Second country.

AM: Yes, second country, and just from my own experience of being pecked to death by questions, you find yourself in very strange, surreal place in your life where you feel like you're in one continuous conversation and which, like a Beckett play, you're repeating yourself over and over and over and over and over again. And I hope that we avoid some of that with the way that I... that we'll conduct this little session together. We are friends and it's not my intention to do anything other than expose you to the great mind of...

DT: Expose me? Expose me.

AM: To expose him. We may sit on each other's laps, we may get frisky - it happened before, it happened at the Royce Hall, it was photographed, I can't deny it. But I think that what I'll do is just give you a taste of what made one of the Thomson's in the room say 'I violently disagree, I've got your book, I read it almost every day - I violently disagree with you about the following entries.' And I think that it would be a sad state of affairs if any of us would read a series of entries in David's book and agree with all of them. He's extremely opinionated. Here we are on Alfridge Hitchcock. So... he's commonly know as Alfred Hitchcock as well but that was my own pronunciation of his name to begin with.

'Ignorance and fear are the abiding impressions left by Hitchcock's films. Just as the suspense works through deliberately withheld knowledge and withheld from the hyper-sensitive voyeuristic curiosity that is aroused, so he teaches us to share the fear of the world that he always owned up to. Why not face the implications of his two celebrated admissions that he feared above all the rest and that his aim in cinema was to put the audience through that?

'I would deny that his films can lead to great insights of an intensely pessimistic vision, but I do not see how a man so fearful and so chronically adept at conveying fear can be judged as a profound artist. Suffering in his films invariably depends upon the victims being unbalanced or demented. The pain felt by Perkins in Psycho [1960] or Stewart in Vertigo [1958] is savage, yet it is more limited than that in Renoir or Mizoguchi or Welles because of Hitchcock's resort to mania and melodrama.

'Hitchcock's most profound subject and achievement is a juxtaposition of sanity and insanity, of bourgeois ordinariness and criminal outrage. This crisscross motif, derived from thriller fiction, is itself a map of the way audiences willingly cross over from their seats to involve themselves in the film. James Stewart being drawn into Kim Novak in Vertigo is a model of the way we are sucked into films. Charming Robert Walker and boring Farley Granger make a trap for our need to identify. The method of Rear Window [1954], a voyeur in the dark inspecting other lives is the principal of cinematic spectacle.

'Hitchcock's best films all grow out of his instinctive employment of our impulses and fantasy life in the cinema. And his moral seriousness consists of showing us the violent, psychotic fruits of some of those impulses and shyly asking us to claim them as our own. I say "shyly" because Hitchcock did not properly own up to his seriousness. It's not enough to paint Hitchcock the interviewee as a sly leg-puller who teased earnest questions. The truth may be he did not fully grasp his own films. Truffaut's book amply reveals a man of very mundane, very shallow moral and social attitudes, flip rather than witty, generally more interested in technique rather than meaning, and it must be said there is a degree of spiritual coarseness and callousness in Hitchcock's work that chimes with a career-long taste for brutalising our nerves.'

I don't know anybody who's described Hitchcock in, to my mind, so perfectly as in those few paragraphs. So, as I said, I think that David writes better than almost anybody about film. He almost writes better than anybody in film. To read him is that very rare thing, beautiful prose and a constant provocation. It's interesting, Sean French, son of Philip French, who's another notable and excellent writer on film, was reviewing this great new book of David's, The Whole Equation, and made, I thought, a very cogent point about how to contextualize this book. When David wrote his introduction to the first Biographical Dictionary of Film, he talked heroically about the 10,000 hours spent in the dark, many of them at the Granada Tooting, as he said the wonderful mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. In the 1994 edition he confessed he saw fewer films now, often preferring to go for a walk or to look at paintings or to take in a ball game.

Eight years later, he admitted that he'd learned that he loved books much more than he did films. And I think in this new book, The Whole Equation, which I don't think is a book you can read... I certainly couldn't read it in a single sitting - it's like one that you have to sip for it's rather tart and complex lament - it's a kind of whole equation of David himself. The way he wants to write and think about film, reaching out to use contemplations of the when, the where, the how of the movie, which studio, how much the film's cost, what deals have been made, who was divorcing whom, who was in psychoanalysis, who was at war with whom, both personally and globally, what it meant to be a Jew in Hollywood, what psychoanalysis has done to Hollywood, what television has done to it... it's almost like the best practice of the bfi to me, what the bfi is about. He illuminates how the context of a movie informs its content. And he speaks well about how there's an ongoing practice of education about how to read a book, but very little education about how to read a moving image or a film sentence.

AM: He is, in a way, what I wish for, what I wish the bfi was doing more of, and what it could be. But to me this is a kind of autobiographical dictionary, this book, of a failed but passionate love affair with the movies. And I'm going to start this conversation with David - where I'm going to shut up soon and he's going to start talking - with a little primer, which is stolen not from this new book, but from a relative to this new book, a wonderful piece of writing called Beneath Mulholland, which was subtitled Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts. Because, like all of us, David has been writing the same book all his life. And it's been getting glummer and glummer and better and more complicated.

20 Things...

In Beneath Mulholland he wrote a piece called '20 Things People Like to Forget about Hollywood.' And I thought I might get this brilliant man to return to those 20 things in the light of this new book The Whole Equation. So now the floor is David Thomson's and I'm going to start with my primer of these 20 points. 'All people in Hollywood...' this is a section people like to forget these 20 things about Hollywood. No.1: 'All people in Hollywood...' - and I can attest to this - '...are dysfunctional.' [laughter]

DT: You want me to comment on that?

AM: You're going to explain all of these points to us.

DT: Alright. I think it is a place and an environment and a world and a medical health system where melodrama has so taken over that people have to be unwell, not necessarily in a physical, clinical sense - better not to be in a physical sense, because then you're beyond cure - and a famous Hollywood psychiatrist once told me that it took her a long time to understand how to deal with people in Hollywood and everything fell into place, her life became smooth and serene and profitable when she realised that everything would be fine so long as she didn't threaten these people with a cure, because then they were lost, lost souls. So long as they knew they were not quite well, not quite all there, they could function. So it's dysfunctional function. Are we clear?

AM: How does this relate to how you write about psychoanalysis in the new book?

DT: Well, I think it's essentially a great metier of comedy.

AM: You talk about the arrival of the notion of psychoanalysis and Hollywood and the effect it had on the kind of movies that were being made.

DT: Well, I'll tell a David Selznick story that I've told before, because I think it gets this... He was in a terrible, terrible state because he'd had two successes in a row. And as you know...

AM: That's terrible.

DT: ...I mean you've nearly been there... [laughter] two immense successes in a row can break your life apart. And he had won the Oscar for best picture twice. And he had more money than he could dream of, more money than he could lose comfortably at the gaming tables, which was what he tended to do with the money. He had just discovered Jennifer Jones, which would ruin his life and he needed treatment. And he was allegedly very depressed and sitting in hotel rooms and doing nothing, and his wife found an analyst for him - the mother of the woman I was talking about earlier - and made an appointment for David to see her. He turned up about ten hours late, but the woman had been told that he would turn up ten hours late so she was to stay there, yes they would pay for the ten hours and everything, and finally David comes in and he says 'you know, I don't believe in any of this and I'm very... I've been in a very bad tempered mood about everything today and I... just don't let me be too rude to you,' to the woman, you see. And they start and after half an hour he gets very interested. And she says 'Mr Selznick, you seem... your mood's lifting, I've never had quite such a rapid reaction before.' And he says 'well, it seems to me that I know what we're doing. This is just like a story conference. Only the story's about me.' [laughter] And I think that's how people go through analysis in Hollywood, maybe in America as a whole. It's a very, very big thing in America and people will tell you about their analysis, what stage it's at, whether you ask or not. It's an apparatus, it's like talking about the weather.

AM: Okay. So point 2 in this 20 things...

DT: We only have two hours you know.

AM: I know, we're going to get there. I once went... oh no, I'm going to say this... so no.2: 'The apocalypse has already happened in Hollywood.'

DT: Yes, the disaster has occurred and so don't worry about the earthquake and everything else that may happen... or the end of the world. It has happened already. It is an ecological, geographical disaster already.

AM: But again, in the book, you're very interesting about how you use this notion of the geography of Hollywood, the geography of Northern California. You talk about...

DT: Well, yeah.

AM: ...say some things about that.

DT: Well you know this and many people here will do too and I'm being very flippant, I'm playing his game with him. California is a paradise. It is still a paradise. Don't let this get out. Don't send people there. It's just magnificent. And you have to remember that a big part of the excitement in movies was the light and the landscape. You get there and you suddenly say to yourself 'you could make any story here...' within easy reach of Los Angeles. And you could and you still could and I still don't know why they don't do that more than they do. They go to these incredible locations we won't go into now. But it is a truly beautiful place and although, on the one hand it's been technically ruined, on the other hand it's unspoiled, if you know what I mean.

AM: But more than that, and I think very significantly, it's built on a fault line.

DT: Yes. So is San Francisco. Almost anyone who's been there any time has lived through an earthquake. And I had a twelve-day-old baby in the 1989 earthquake and my wife and I - who is a sane woman, you know - we both agreed we had to get out of town but we never did. And there will be another one. And the fault line vibrates quite often. You could literally feel what's coming.

AM: But I think that your point, I'm just paraphrasing you...

DT: It's a very melodramatic situation again...

AM: It's a gamble.

DT: It's a living movie, it's a gamble.

AM: It's a business which is about gambling and it's a geography which is about a culture and a gamble.

DT: And something else I say in the book is that Las Vegas, entire Las Vegas, is to be seen as a Hollywood movie. A movie set, but a movie. It's the perfect demonstration of 'yes, of course you can make the big break and... you just come on down and have your chance at it.'

AM: For some reason that earthquake... I was reminded of an actor friend of mine who'd gone and was staying in somebody's apartment on the night of the earthquake. And I was just about to leave and he was meant to meet an actress who was the other guest of this actor who was away - so they were both guests who didn't know each other who were going to be staying there that night - and it happened to coincide with the night of the earthquake. The earthquake happened, my friend knew the one thing you had to do was to stand under the doorframe. So as the bed started rattling he ran out of bed completely naked, stood under his doorframe. The actress, who was staying in the other room, ran out of bed, completely naked and stood under her doorframe and they said 'hello' to each other, which I think is one of the most beautiful and typical Hollywood images.

DT: And also it says something else... it's the private house as a hotel.

AM: Yes, which it definitely is.

DT: Yes.

AM: You are their plaything, we audiences, not the other way round. You, the audience are the plaything.

DT: Yeah, they really sort of... they talk about us as to how high we'll jump out of the seat, whether we'll come, what we come, they research us. They try to analyse us, they try to make their product, in terms of what they know about us, they do social-psychological research, in terms of how they should make the films. It's useless, it's pointless and it's usually nothing compared with someone who comes up with a rare story. The rare story will always discover something in the audience that they didn't know was there themselves. You know, it's the great amazement of certain films year after year... 'oh God, I've never seen anything like that.' And it isn't that you've never seen special effects. You've never seen stories quite like that.

Love, sex and innocence

AM: I think it's important to say that, joking apart, this is a serious book. It's a book... it purports to be something it isn't. It isn't really a history of Hollywood. It is a sort of lament because I think that you have had a profound love affair with cinema and I do feel...

DT: Oh, I agree with that entirely.

AM: ...there's something in the book which is so angry about that love affair. It feels like you want to...

DT: Well it's also a little bit like... it's not just a love affair, it's like one of those Hollywood marriages where you keep marrying the same person. You go through the divorce but then you remarry. And the comedy of remarriage is classic Hollywood invention. Not where you find someone else but you re-woo the woman or the man you were married to before. There's hardly a literary model for it. It's something that Hollywood fashioned. And I think it was in great part because they were both obsessed with but very anxious about how much divorce was playing a part in their own lives. And maybe even they were concerned about the consequent eruption of divorces in American society. Because there again, I can't believe divorce would have taken off in American society in the way it did but for the movies. I don't mean it's the only factor behind it, but the movies legitimise so many things.

AM: Well, sex is one of the things you talk about it legitimising.

DT: Yeah, and of course sex has gone out of the film now. And there isn't much sex in America these days. I don't know whether you noticed that when you were there but it's definitely in retreat.  

AM: Well, you sing...

DT: Literally preparedness means a certain amount of sexual denial. I think you can expect to see the birth rate begin to decline in America.

AM: You believe that, don't you?

DT: I think it could happen, yeah.

AM: In fact, is Michael Winterbottom in the audience? He ought to be because he gets a lot of praise from this guy on my right. He's written, he's made a new film and you have... only recently celebrating how important you think it is.

DT: I think 9 Songs [2004] is an absolutely fantastic, great film, yes.

AM: You know this is the new Michael Winterbottom film which is essentially a great deal of sexual activity in a movie, isn't it?

DT: A great deal. [laughter] And set in Brixton, which I like too.

AM: So you talk about in this 20 things that 'Everyone in Hollywood is in the movies.'

DT: Oh, yes. You go out to dinner and the waiter comes up and the waiter is not just better looking than the stars you've just cast, but he does a better audition. Waiters do superb auditions because they are almost always would-be actors or would-be screenwriters or maybe both. I once went to pitch a story to a very great Hollywood executive - we can name him, Bernie Brillstein, very funny man - walked into the room and was told we had half an hour to pitch this story to get a screenplay. Brillstein occupied the entire 30 minutes with telling stories about himself, many about his psychoanalysis and at the end of the talk said 'I think we got to do this.' [laughter] There was no evidence that he knew what it was we had to do. He wanted to talk for 30 minutes, he... - you know these guys - he wanted an audience. And that's what we were. And what he paid for the audience was the development money on the screenplay.

AM: I think that what's interesting though is that - and I've always detected this in you - is that the one thing that keeps me working is that I'm an idealist and the one thing that is poisoning your pen to some degree is that you've lost your idealism about... you've lost your innocence about the movies. Because David came to my cutting room on Cold Mountain and was worried on my behalf I think about the... there was some kind of innocence in the movie that made you nervous for it - or lack of guile. And I think that it seems to me that the difference between people who are trying to make movies - and I know there are some in the audience now - and those who write about them is that the minute we lose our innocence, it stops really.

DT: Yeah.

Following your heart

AM: But if you don't believe that you can make a movie that will change everybody, change everything, change yourself, fix everything, fix yourself, then there's no reason. It's too hard.

DT: Much too hard.

AM: It's too hard to make them, it's too hard to go through... my partner Sydney Pollack is previewing a movie in America, previewed last night, previewed last week, previewed the week before. This notion that you put your movie up in front of 300 people who tell you repeatedly what they don't like about it and what you should fix in it, where you go wrong in it and who they like in it and whose tummy is too loose and whose bottom is too flat and whose... you know, whatever it is that they don't like about individual characters or... and then the next day you're subjected to a market analyst who... I don't know if you know about this practice where they come in and they say '50 per cent of women below the ages of nineteen thought the first half of the movie was too slow, 50 per cent of men over 25 thought the second half of the movie was too slow, 30 per cent of men under the age of nineteen thought there were insufficient numbers of bangs, 50 per cent of the audience over... thought' ... and you're supposed somehow to pick your way...

DT: To deal with it, yes.

AM: ...through your movie, going 'now, where were there too many bangs and what...' The sense of attrition and gauntlet, unless you finally believe at the end of that process, if you can hold your compass and hold your nerve, it was worth it.

DT: And what it takes away from is that most challenging, but most absorbing thing of all, I think, of being your own editor. Of looking at your own film, taking a certain amount of opinion and advice from a few people you may trust, but in the end making your decision and saying 'no, that doesn't work for me.' And I think still that the films that come out of Hollywood even that are the best and the most successful is where someone has contrived to narrow the area of responsibility down, as small as possible. And in just a few cases... Chaplin... Chaplin didn't listen to anyone. He just followed his own heart and his own instincts and his own feelings. And I'm not saying it's foolproof as a method, but in the end you're going to get the blame, you know, so you might as well make the decision. And all this stuff, all this previewing... nightmarish... you travel to these events and you stand in the back of theatres... it's really degrading and humiliating, and if you look at the notes you get, the interpretation, the analysis finally, you could take everything in the film out. There are no questions that deal with the spirit of the film, are there? They all deal with technical areas and things like that.

AM: Well, the thing is though that what's changed - and I think this is what your book is about - what's changed is the mechanisms by which controls are exerted in Hollywood. I have what's called final cut of my movies which means that contractually nobody can interfere with any element of my film, or else I'm obliged or I'm allowed to take my name from the film. So if I go in front of an audience, I'm saying that this movie is entirely authored by me. But the reality is that the authoring - as somebody once said - of a film is the projectionist, is in the hands of the projectionist because he or she is responsible for threading the film through the projection booth and often then in the process they make little cuts into the film and then as time goes on the film is modulated by this rosary of small cuts... killed by small cuts, your film. But also the distributor who elects both how many cinemas your film's going to be shown in, or how much money they are going to spend alerting people to the fact that the movie's going to be shown in the cinema.

So effectively, however much authorial control you might have over content, the experience of the film is essentially in the control of the distributor. And that's what's changed, I think, in the last 20 or 30 years in Hollywood. But I think that one thing that you point out which I know to be interesting if not true is that... I was watching a documentary about Bach recently, who's my hero, and one of the things that I noted was that he wrote a cantata every week. On Monday he drew up the stave lines, then he wrote the cantata - just that little thing - then he divided up into parts, did the orchestrations, rehearsed and they performed the cantata on Sunday. Monday, new pages, write again. There's absolutely no opportunity in that process for any kind of editorial invasion whatsoever. It's just happening. And there's also no opportunity for contemplation. And one of the things that's happened now to filmmakers is that, liberated from a contractual relationship with studios... and some of the movies that you celebrate the most and love the most are products of the studio... salaried... you make a movie, you're on the movie, you come off it, you're on the next movie, you're off it, the whole game of the star system and the contract system in Hollywood... one of the things it ensured was the cantata system in Hollywood, which was that there was simply no opportunity to say 'I wish I hadn't done a battle scene in my previous film, I think I'm going to go for the domestic...' because you were simply onto the next song on the jukebox. And I think what often you recognise is that unconscious articulation of taste rather than... because now directors don't make very many movies. They can't.

DT: No. Too few.

AM: And as a result of that each movie becomes an argument with the whole of the work you've done in the past. Trying to fix what you've done wrong in the past as opposed to simply carrying on speaking. And because exegesis now is biting at the heels of the movies, no sooner out than it's put into a Biographical Dictionary of Film or put into Time Out Guide to a movie. You're already trying to read your own sense of what you've achieved before you just get on and make the new cantata on a Monday morning.

DT: I think this is so important because what people nowadays don't realize is that in the great days of American film, the process was really not mediated at all. There wasn't really any useful, sensible, searching commentary in the papers. There weren't film critics in the way that Pauline Kael became a film critic. There weren't books on film. People just went to the movies. And I think they would have gone, whatever was playing. They went to their local theatre probably twice a week. In 1946 when the American population was over 100 million less than it is now, 100 millions tickets a week were sold. It was a constant flow of people to sit in the dark and look at the light. And that's really what it was. I don't even think people came out of movies and got into arguments in the way we all do all the time now. 'Was that a good film? Was that a bad film?' I think they just said 'that was a movie.' They just took it in. It was like a little bit of going to a ballgame. 'Was that a good ballgame?' 'I don't know, but I always go and watch the team play.' That was the way it was. You always went to see the movies play. And it was a constant climatic kind of thing rather than you are in the position of having to make a critical decision. The critical decision making process in American film, which really begins in the 60s and is backed up by this huge surge of people into colleges to study film, so people have to teach them, people have to write books to get tenure and hence we have 3,000 film books, it actually coincides, I think, with a nearly complete loss of confidence in the industry making the films.

The terrible dilemma of the filmmaker

AM: One thing that I think - and you touch upon this in the book - is a relationship between the novel and modernism in the novel, and modernism in the film and I think that this is particularly pertinent to what you are talking about because the odd thing is if you look at the way that film culture has developed in 100 years, it's almost entirely escaped the discoveries and fracturings of modernism and that's to do with cost. Because cost enables... if I want to write a poem it costs me the price of a piece of paper and a pencil. You can borrow the pencil, you can write on the back of a serviette and you can write The Wasteland. If you want to make The Wasteland on film, then you have to have a huge amount of money and a whole group of people prepared to go with you on that collaborative journey to create something which is as fragmented and as challenging, as experimental and as risky as The Wasteland. And I think that one of the things that's happened is that also there's a kind of constipation in film which has come from this absolute assertion of narrative, because there's nothing intrinsically narrative about film. The film sentence is the most extraordinary opportunity imaginable, putting one image after another image, the possibilities are greater than any other art form to explode narrative, to explode experiment with syntax, to make a genuinely modernist artefact, except that the cost is so gargantuan...

DT: I think that's the point. Suppose you were writing a novel. Suppose you take a year on the novel, which is your own time, probably, and you get to a point after a year, you may be very close to finished on what you thought was the novel and you look it over and you say 'I hate it. I loathe it. And I realize now that things I did in the first days were going down the wrong road. I'm going to throw the thing out and I'm going to start again.' Now countless works of art - alleged art - in many media, came about because of that sort of process. The terrible dilemma of the filmmaker is that he gets no opportunity like that down the road because you are then locked in. you are locked into a deal first of all, but you are locked into 120 people being dependent on your say so, and if you are a good team leader that is a big thing, 120 people. And you've shot half the film and you may be clever enough to begin to tinker with what you're re-shooting and yes, in the editing room you can begin to take it apart in different ways, but if you've made a casting decision which, let's say, three months later you realize was the wrong casting decision, there's nothing you can do about it. You probably cannot literally draw up that person from the film. The load you have taken on in the work has trapped you completely, don't you think?

AM: Well, what I do think is that - obviously I'm responding... I can't answer this in the way that you can ask it - but I can say that what is true is that preparation in film is almost everything. And that preparation is a kind of... can get moved towards autopsy in the sense that if you have drawn every frame of a sequence, then you're no longer witnessing as an artist, you're collecting as a worker. If you've got... the camera goes, pans 180 degrees, we know we've got this here, this there, we've got a coach going by, if you're making a period movie, then you can't say 'I think I'll go out and see what the 1860s are looking like this morning.' Nothing appears in your frame unless you put it there. Which means that in March in London, you're contemplating October in Charleston. And you're thinking 'okay, what will happen is the light will come over that street, when it hits that thing, he'll walk out of the door, we'll have the coach go by, that's four coaches, that's twelve extras, two riders, four men, black coats, we'll have eighteen people walking by, the chain gang will be six - in the first gang six, in the second gang twelve people, I'll cast ten of them in...' and it's all about... it's not about showing up and saying 'I wonder what the chain gangs are doing this morning.'

DT: And then someone can still come along and say 'You know about March, it's not Charleston, it's Croatia.' And people walk differently in Croatia, which seems like a tiny silly thing, don't people walk the same all over earth? No, they don't. And tiny details like that can really begin to undermine a vision. But you talk about that vision... Hitchcock saw everything in advance, drew everything in advance and I think there is a way in which that is antithetical to cinema. Because I love, myself, the Renoir-like method, which says 'well, that's what I was going to film but then I saw that goat over there in the meadow and I love that goat and I'm going to find a way to put that goat in even if I have to move the actress to one side.' Do you know what I mean? Just responding to what is there... nature... light.

AM: One thing of course is that the camera's a one-eyed creature. A very peculiar thing happens with the camera - if you're shooting up a hill, the camera's got one eye so it reduces the dimentionality of the run. So somebody climbing looks as though they're walking in a straight... it's very bizarre the illusions that occur because there's only one eye functioning. And I always thing that when you're shooting, you have to find a way to keep you're other eye open. And some directors do it better than others.

'What you write about comes from love'

AM: But I think that leads me on to I think a very important question, and I'm going to just bounce on this occasion, because I want to ask you something more important, I think, to this audience because what you write about - however bitter it can be and however annihilating it can be - comes from love. And I wonder if you'd just like to talk about maybe a couple of the times that you've fallen in love in the cinema and why you have.

DT: Only a couple? With the films, you mean?

AM: I meant that question in all its meanings. Because I think there's a second...

DT: There's a lot of ways you can fall in love with a movie theatre. Well, yeah, there is no question for me, but that one day was absolutely vital. I think I was seven or eight... that sort of age, and in South London in those days films were shown in continuous performance. So the movies started at 12 and they went through until 11pm. There was a very short interval between the films and there was no fuss or bother about clearing the theatre between shows. And an aunt took me to see Red River [Howard Hawks, 1947] and when the film ended, she turned to me and said 'well come along, we've got shopping to do and stuff like that' and so forth and I said 'no, I'm staying here.' Because I had realised that you could stay there, I'm not sure how I realised that. And it wasn't so much that I wanted to see the film again, although I did, obviously. But I wanted to be in that valley where they push the cattle back and forth all through the film. I have since realised it's the same valley - I even know what valley it is, I've been there - but I did not want to quit the place, you know what I mean? I remember an occasion where I directed a play, at Dartmouth, and on the last night of the last performance - and I've heard many people have had this experience in the theatre - the cast would not leave the stage. The audience had all gone. But they just wanted to sit on the set because they knew if they quit the set, someone was going to come and pull the set apart. And it was a physical thing, I wanted to be in that place. So that was one great occasion.

The other was the first time I saw Citizen Kane [Orson Welles, 1941], when I had imagined... because I had read about it a little bit and had known that there was this film Citizen Kane that was out of the ordinary, and I discovered a local theatre, a local repertory theatre, The Classic, Tooting, if you like, was going to play it and I assumed there would be a vast crowd there... this was 1955 or so. I assumed there'd be a huge crowd there because everyone had been waiting for Citizen Kane which had been unavailable since 1941... and got there early and I was the only person there. Well, much as I love seeing films in a dense, packed audience, if the first time you see Kane, to be alone in the cinema, just like Mr Kane in Xanadu, it's perfect, because you get the solitude that that film is about. I didn't understand the film, but that was the moment when I knew, somehow, I wanted to do that thing. And then for me it's only ever been possible to write about that thing as opposed to actually do it, because I think temperamentally I'm better at that. But... there are two... that was falling in love I think, yeah... Montgomery Clift was involved in the first one too, you know. And I certainly fell in love with him.

AM: I think that's a very important thing to say about acting. You talk about Nicole Kidman in your book, very interesting chapter, and I think that one of the things which is extraordinary and... I was... when I made Truly Madly Deeply [1990] I remember being at the Toronto Film Festival where it was playing and somebody celebrating the film, particularly in the light of Juliet Stevenson's performance. And I was talking about the fact that somebody had asked me to re-cast... they wanted to get some American beauty to play that part and I'd written the film for Juliet - who I think has her own complete and ravishing beauty but it's not conventional - and they said well they wanted to finance the movie but that they wanted to have an American ingénue in the part and I didn't want to do that, so I made the film with BBC money and in a much smaller and more modest way. And as I was being rather... I was on the moral high ground, talking about this after the screening of Truly Madly Deeply, I was thinking about Atom Egoyan's film that was going to be showing the next day and how his wife, who was certainly then and probably still is one of the most beautiful women in the world, Armenian woman, I was thinking I couldn't wait to go and have a look at her in the cinema next door. And it made me alert to the paradoxes of cinema, which are that on the one hand we're looking for something we recognise as being a reflection of ourselves and our own tribulations and desires and failings but at the same time we're looking for these idealised versions of ourselves, both masculine and feminine, and I think it's very important for all of us to acknowledge we haven't only fallen in love with our gender of choice, as it were, but we've also fallen in love with the other gender.

DT: Don't you think this has had a huge, encouraging, warming effect on the general liberalisation in attitudes to bisexuality, gayness, that kind of thing?

AM: Are you going to just talk about our relationship directly in the middle of this conversation?

DT: Well, the photograph is in the papers tomorrow. [laughter]

AM: But film necessarily leads towards... if it's done correctly leads towards compassion in every sense.

DT: Sure, but it's... listen, when I was seven, I did not know that Montgomery Clift was homosexual. I'm not sure he knew at that time he was, because he was a mess. I know that I responded to him in a way that said 'I want to be like him. I want to look like him.' I never made it, but I also wanted Joanne Dru, I also wanted John Wayne as my father. For me it was a great film because every possible aspect of my life hooked me at the same time. Now, years later, I discovered Clift was gay. I'm not gay but I think I have an openness... and I've had friendships, big friendships with gay people that I do not think someone of my father's generation would have been remotely capable of. And I... the more I think about it the more I think that movie has encouraged this in all of us, because there's never been a medium that says 'look, you can love men and women alike' and not just that you can, but that you almost have to, you know what I mean?

AM: I do but I think it goes... I think you're narrowing the implications of this phenomena of film, which is simply that when you have a medium which allows you to inhabit the feeling... you say something: 'no visual effect is as transforming as a change in the aspect of an actor...' I can't... I'm misquoting you but you say...

DT: A human face changing its mind.

AM: A human face changing its mind.

DT: Yes.

AM: There's nothing that any visual effect can match...

DT: It's the most special effect in film, don't you think?

AM: Absolutely. But it's also the effect that while the camera is on any face, it becomes the leading face in the film. And also, it offers you a perspective which feels wholly inhabited, which means that whereas when you sit in your own life with your very limited repertory of experience: one set of parents, one set of loved ones, one set of everything, one... that what you know and how you look at the world is entirely defined by what's going on in your own context. When you go to the movies, you're suddenly older than you know, you're younger than you are right now, you're a different colour, you're a different creed, you have a different relationship with the world. And you inhabit it perfectly. And as a result of that, it moves you, by definition, towards a pluralist, compassionate view. I think the better the film the more it changes your life.

DT: I agree, because I think you have to identify - in a good film, it may even be in a bad film - you have to identify with nearly everyone in the film. And as you say, if there's a close up or even if there's a face that we're really being directed to look at, even if that face has one line or half a line, it's the most important thing at that instant. And a good filmmaker can make you feel the whole life that is behind that half second.

AM: Do you think that... where are we? Where's Stuart because he's the boss of this event? Where are you Stuart? Put your hand up somewhere.

DT: He's left us, he's just left us.

AM: He's looking at the back...

DT: He's gone out to get the picture.

AM: What are we doing in terms of time? Should I be throwing open this discussion a little bit to your avid group of fans here? If not we'll rattle on for, as you know, for hours. So would anybody like to ask David some questions right now? Go ahead.

Audience questions: Million Dollar Baby and The Woodsman

Audience member: I had one about Million Dollar Baby [Clint Eastwood, 2004], which I know you love... and the fairly recent reaction by Republican... [inaudible...] to end of the film... what your take on that is... whether it was a surprising event or what it says about film in Hollywood today...

AM: Can you just repeat the question?

DT: Yes, the question concerns Million Dollar Baby and the nature and the effect of, basically, right-wing attitude to it. Is that fair? Can I ask first, how many people here have not seen Million Dollar Baby? Yeah, I really do not want to spoil it for you. There is a kind of pact among film critics that does not get into the element this gentleman is talking about because it is a film made - unusually by today's standards - with a very strong element of surprise. And Eastwood himself, who is certainly no fool as a producer, has tried to keep it very quiet... he's tried to keep it low-key. The film opened in America in only a very few theatres and has gradually gone wider. There is something in the story that a certain kind of middle American - and when I say middle American I mean all the middle bit, apart from the coastal areas around - if you can see the sea in America you vote Democrat and if you can't, you don't - has jumped on and has said is variously shocking or damaging or whatever. I would only say that I think that to see the film is to find those comments ridiculous and redundant, and also I think it reminds me that Eastwood is a very special kind of American... he's a natural conservative who has many liberal attitudes and ideas. And Eastwood himself has said 'where the hell is this coming from?'

But it is part of the barely suppressed wrath in America, that The Passion of the Christ [Mel Gibson, 2004] got very few nominations... it got nominations for make-up, I believe, which it certainly earned [laughter], but it didn't get some of those central nominations which, in many ways, a big subject film - and it's a big subject - and I think it was the third highest-grossing film last year and Mel Gibson has won before so... it meets most of the criteria of being a really respectable film, but it didn't get awards. America is a very, very troubled country at the moment, which is not to say that it will not come through and recover and be glorious again - I think it will - but there are battles coming out into the open in America and this is just one smallish one that I think should come out into the open, because I think the silliness will solve the problem. And I think when all the people in this audience see Million Dollar Baby, which I urge you to do in the next two weeks, because otherwise you're not going to understand why it's going to win Best Picture - which it is - I think everyone will then say 'well that was a stupid attitude to take.' But at the moment it's gathering attention.

AM: Go ahead.

Audience member: The Woodsman [Nicole Kassell, 2004]... [inaudible...] I wondered what you felt really about the sense of performance of... the development of Kevin Bacon's career... I saw it at the film festival and I was quite pleasantly surprised...

DT: My Sunday column in The Independent is on Kevin Bacon's development [laughter] and... not that I've discovered it - I think anyone with any sense knows he's been a very good actor for a long time. And this is a film that I think would not have been made without his resolution to get it made. Unfortunately, hardly anyone is going to see it because, I suppose, there's something that seems not entertaining about it. I think it's a terrific performance. But if you remember Sleepers [1996]... you remember Sleepers? The Barry Levinson film? Where he played a child abuser... if you remember In the Cut [Jane Campion, 2003] where he was actually uncredited, it's been clear for a while that he's very interested in playing troubled people. And I think it's a sign that he's realized that his career as a young lead - which was always tenuous - is not going any further. He's not a lot short of 50, I believe, although he looks younger, and I think he's realizing what a lot of people realize, that the good parts are often unpleasant characters, you know?

AM: I think to just amplify that, first of all Stuart tells me that The Woodsman is on tomorrow evening at the NFT. Let's plug it, it's a great movie and worth seeing. And the other thing which is certainly true and why the NFT is so central to our lives is it's one of the few places you can see that movie because people don't like to go and see this kind of movie. And one of the saddest things for filmmakers is that the... somebody said about Ibsen the faint odour of spiritual paraffin which attends movies like The Woodsman is enough to put people off from going. And on the whole, 'issue movies' are like spinach for audiences. They feel like they're... it's good for them but they don't want to eat it. And it's really dispiriting that that film, even Academy members are not voting for that performance because they're simply not wanting to look at the movie, they think they're going to have an unhappy experience. Which is in a way, I think, a testimony to how visceral the film experience is. One thing that we all know is that if we've been to see a movie which moves us, it feels as though we've physically have been involved in the film. I mean you feel exhausted, emotionally exhausted by the movies because it engages with you in a way that's almost impossible to fully understand why we can... David was talking about his first memory of an experience in the movies and what it meant to want to stay in the valley. I remember my parents coming home after I'd been watching on BBC1, when it first started showing movies, it showed The Blue Angel [Der blaue Engel, Josef von Sternberg, 1930] and they found me - I must have been seven - just in tears...

DT: This accounts for a lot.

AM: ... in tears...

DT: Your feathers thing.

AM: ... just completely heartbroken. And I think that it's a shame that certain bits of work are avoided because we can't bear to imagine what it will be like to sit in front of them and that certainly is a testimony to film's power. Another...

DT: I suspect though that the DVD audience for The Woodsman will be quite big. Because I think word of mouth is going to get around about the film and it's probably a film that many people will be more comfortable watching alone.

Creeping sourness

AM: Now I think we've got microphones, is that right? A microphone is going to come down to this lady in the front here.

Audience member: I wanted to ask why do you think your love affair with cinema went sour? Was there a specific trigger? Or is it just a creeping sourness in your attitude to it?

DT: Creeping sourness. It's called growing older. I think a whole lot of things. I would argue that the overall tenor of filmmaking is not at a great peak at the moment. And I think that's been going on for a little time. We could argue about it but when I did the first edition of the Biographical Dictionary - it was written in the early 70s - that was an amazing time. Not just for American films, international films. It was a very rich time. I don't think the times are as rich now. And I think that personally I have become more and more interested in writing. And that leads you, eventually - if publishers will allow it - to start writing about things other than film. So it's a mixture of that. I wouldn't quarrel with the word 'sourness' - and certainly my children would say 'spot on, sourness is it' - but I truly... I was in tears at the end of Million Dollar Baby. The right movie can still get me. You've got to go see that movie, you guys, you really got to go see it.

AM: Gentleman at the front.

Audience member: Thank you. Yeah, I was just wondering if you had a take on Martin Scorsese's The Aviator [2004] and going back to what you were saying about 'issue films', whether something like Mike Leigh's Vera Drake [2004] could actually beat it at the Oscars?

DT: At the BAFTAs you mean?

Audience member: At the forthcoming Oscars.

DT: The forthcoming Oscars?

Audience member: Yeah, and also, sorry, just to qualify that about Martin Scorsese, who hasn't been acknowledged by the Academy as far as I know.

DT: He has never won an Oscar for director.

Audience member: Do you think this is his year or will something like a small British film like Vera Drake could actually win?

DT: I don't think this is his year, although... you are a member of the Academy. There is undoubtedly a feeling in the community of the Academy that a terribly ongoing injustice has occurred with Scorsese because he is a phenomenal figure. It may be - I tend to this view myself - that the films he made early on look at the moment like his best films and they were very challenging, tough films at the time. For the Academy to have given him the Oscar for Taxi Driver [1976] at the time would have been, I think, beyond the reach...

AM: Or Raging Bull [1980].

DT: Or Raging Bull... beyond the reach of the Academy. I think, looking back now, many members of the Academy say to themselves 'well, I wish we'd given it for one of those' because I don't think The Aviator is his best work, by far. But there is a feeling there that he deserves something. I would, if I were running the Academy - and no-one really is, it's a club, it works according to the group membership - I would give Scorsese an honorary Oscar this year, whether he wins for The Aviator or not, because I think he... his achievement, not just as a director but his achievement as a man of film is exemplary and quite amazing. My opinion is that Clint Eastwood will win the Oscar for best director but that's opinion.

AM: This gentleman here's been very patient and there's a man at the back. Just wait for the mic so everybody can hear your question.

Audience member: I share your absolute adoration of Howard Hawks, especially. And I was wondering, because you're...

DT: Who never won an Oscar for direction.

Audience member: No, I know, it's terrible. And when you write about The Big Sleep [1946], you say about how it's about the process of making film. And I'd love you to expand on that. And also, please write a book about Howard Hawks. That's it.

DT: Well, I think The Big Sleep for me is one of the perfect films. Not the only one he made. I think it's about the enchantment of film. It's a film that... you sort of feel if you've got Bogart and Bacall and you've got Jules Furthman writing the dialogue and everything else you've got, why does the film need to stop? The story is unintelligible, exactly as Anthony says, it's a succession of images of people talking to each other and moving and changing position. It's a game. Why does the game have to stop? It should go on forever. It's a rapture, I think, and I think you and I agree, we've talked about this before, there is in many great films a just 'oh God, let that go on. It's just so sublime, you know?' And Hawks, I think, did it on and on, because really he changed the title and he changed the cast but for 30 years he made the same film over and over again. And I think a lot of great directors did that. I think that Preston Sturges tended to do that, I think von Sternberg - The Blue Angel - he made seven films with Dietrich and it's really all one film. I think that's part of why it's perfect. A book on Howard Hawks, yeah, that would be tremendous, but probably the number of people who know who he was is declining. That's something else about the temper of our times. In the 60s, for instance, America rediscovered Howard Hawks. Now I think they're in the process of losing him and it's very sad to see that going on.

AM: Well, I think that's one of the great things about this book, by the way, is... if you get to read it is that it makes you remember a period in film which has become unfashionable. Even just reading again about Preston Sturges in the book is fantastic and it makes me want immediately for there to be a Preston Sturges season again at the NFT. And so there's a lot of the future programming in this book...

Literary influences and a quick ten best list

AM: There's a gentleman at the back who was... the gentleman with the dark hair first who's been waiting patiently.

DT: I know that gentleman, I think.

Audience member: You've been talking about films and your opinion about film but the question that you haven't asked is about your literary style. You have a very definite literary style and I wondered if you could say something about your literary antecedents or models that have... from writers or just criticism in general that you felt you drew from or that you admired or that inspired you in some way?

DT: I don't really know how to answer that except to say that I believe it is terribly difficult to describe what people feel while they're watching movie imagery. And that's what it's about. It's trying to convey somehow the feelings you have when you're watching a film. And I've read probably most of the critics who are available and at different times in my life... Manny Farber meant a lot to me, Dilys Powell meant a great deal to me once upon a time, because she seemed to me to be a sane voice and she clearly loved film. I did not like Pauline Kael personally, but reading her was extraordinary and meant a great deal. But I would say that reading what you might even call 'writers' as opposed to 'film writers' has meant more to me than film writing. The best writer on film alive now is Joan Didion who seldom writes film criticism.

AM: The gentleman in front of you.

Audience member: About fifteen years ago I was on a cinema tour of the cinemas of California and in a motel bedroom on the table there was a small yellow card, about the size of a credit card and it said 'Earthquake Safety' and on one side it told you what was likely to happen in an earthquake and on the other side it told you what to do about it, like standing in a doorway. And the last sentence in the paragraph said 'You'll be perfectly safe if you know how to act.' [laughter] And I thought, that says it all about California.

DT: Absolutely. Brilliant. I completely agree.

Audience member: I'll give you a copy of it.

DT: Thank you.

Audience member: The other thing is about the Granada Tooting. The organ is still there, it can be played and heard but not seen because it's underneath a platform. The good news is that they're going to make it so that the organ does rise up at the Granada Tooting and what we'll do next year, maybe this year, we'll put on a performance of Citizen Kane for you, in the Granada Tooting, an experience never to be forgotten and then I want you two gentlemen to be there.

DT: Well, that's very sweet but we all know about organs that don't come up anymore. [laughter] I will be there though, yeah.

AM: Gentleman in the middle row here.

Audience member: [inaudible...]

AM: A quick ten best list.

DT: I want to hear yours. You do one, I'll do one. Come on. Ten best list.

AM: [Ermanno] Olmi's Tree of Wooden Clogs [L'albero degli zoccoli, 1978].

DT: Very good. The Conformist [Il conformista, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970].

AM: I vitelloni [Federico Fellini, 1953].

DT: Céline and Julie Go Boating [Céline et Julie vont en bateau, Jacques Rivette, 1974]. It's a real film.

AM: Well, I'm completely flabbergasted now. Raging Bull.

DT: Ugetsu monogatari [Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953].

AM: The Story of Qiu Ju [Qiuju da guansi, Zhang Yimou, 1992].

DT: Diary of a Country Priest [Journal d'un curé de campagne, Robert Bresson, 1951].

AM: The Night of San Lorenzo [La notte di san lorenzo, Paolo Taviani, 1981].

DT: Blue Velvet [David Lynch, 1986].

AM: The Godfather Part II [Francis Ford Coppola, 1974].

DT: His Girl Friday [Howard Hawks, 1939].

AM: 8 1/2 [Otto e mezzo, Federico Fellini, 1963].

DT: Citizen Kane. There you are. [applause]

AM: That was actually a weird list, wasn't it? But... Mr Thomson, do you have a question for Mr Thomson?

Final audience questions

Audience member: You love Hawks but you hate Ford with an absolute loathing.

DT: No, you say I do, you accused me of this earlier. I love The Searchers [1956]. I've written a lot about The Searchers. I think Ford is hugely overrated. I think Ford is a... I think he's the worst kind of Irish, maudlin drunk. Did I offend enough people with that? [laughter] I think that he got a ton of reputation dumped on him at a time when he seemed to be working in American genres but being serious at the same time. I find his stock company boring whereas I find Hawks's stock company enchanting. I think is his humour is leaden. I think his treatment of women is condescending, although he did use Maureen O'Hara, which is certainly in his favour. And I have a legitimate, thoroughly worked-out argument that he's not very good. I could be wrong and I'm very glad to engage in the argument, but that's what I think. I do think he did one or two remarkable things. But... if, for instance, if you were remotely interested in the story of Wyatt Earp - which as a real story is absolutely fascinating - My Darling Clementine [1946] is a travesty. Now some people say My Darling Clementine is a monument to American folk law. I think it's the people who don't really get what America's about. Earp, the real man, was a mixture of lawman and confidence trickster, of villain and a gambler, who became heroic in the public prints. He's a Robert Altman-like character. Most Americans are. And I sure prefer Altman's view of America to John Ford's. John Ford was in addition an extreme right-winger and I would contest that that shows in all the films.

AM: The gentleman here. Your microphone is just about to arrive.

Audience member: It seems that different countries go through periods of being right at the forefront of the best cinema: Russia, America, Japan, England maybe - I just wondered where you think the country of the moment is now and why?

DT: Where...?

Audience member: Where the country of the moment is now for best cinema?

DT: Well, I think it's apparent that we're in an age where emerging countries, countries that are changing their political order and their nature, their being, their rules, are fundamental. I think one of the reasons American cinema was good at the time it was is that America in those years - the first half of the 20th century - was truly trying to find a way to be American. Now you can argue that as soon as they had found it they departed from it, but I do think there was a real learning process going on. And I think it's countries in learning processes that are generally producing the best and... Asian countries, and I tell you the country that I would say in the next five years is going to make a masterpiece: Iraq.

AM: Let's just have two more questions and I think you can then be at David in the foyer where he'll be signing copies of his new book. So, gentleman here.

Audience member: Yes, just going back to what you said earlier about the way in which people used to watch movies and watch them as movies rather than watch as whether they were good or bad movies. I'm picking up on your stories about watching movies in South London. I'm just wondering, do you think the experience of the continuous run of films, my father said he used to go in ten minutes into a film, would then stay until the ten minutes... the point where they came in and then would leave. Do you think that had an impact on the way in which films were made and were thought about and were talked about?

DT: Yeah, absolutely. And you know there is a fantastic story, which I think says something profound about movies. The original Surrealists in Paris - André Breton and company - would go to the movies. And they would go in while a film was on. And they would wait until they worked out what the story was. At that point, they would get up as one and leave and go to another theatre. What they were looking for was the sheer sensation of the imagery. And I think what they found was that people inevitably scheme out a story in the imagery, but we're clearly at a point, I think, where the beauty of the imagery and the density and the textures of the imagery are things that are begging to be developed and explored. Kids today, teenagers, I don't think watch films for stories. I think they think the story element is silly. I tell a story in my book about taking my son to see the first part of The Matrix [the Wachowski brothers, 1999]. And I turned to him and said 'I can't understand what this is about.' He said 'shut up, just watch.' And it was great film commentary. 'Just watch.' And there are things in this man's work where a novel that was so beyond filming like The English Patient [Anthony Minghella, 1996] is rendered so richly, with such complexity you can't put it into words. And that's what the movies should be. That problem I talked about earlier about how do you describe what's happening on the screen. You shouldn't be able to. Nicholas Ray once said 'if it had all been in the script, why make a movie?'

AM: Well, I think that's... bringing us back to your book for one second it's one of the few quarrels I have with you is your analysis of film writing. Because I think you miss a really significant point which is that authoring in films has nothing to do with writing. That authoring is an activity to do with the pen that becomes a camera that becomes an editing machine and if you just try and... if you're evaluating the film's screenplay as a finished document in any shape or form...

DT: They're unreadable.

AM: They're not... in fact the more interesting the movie, the harder it is to read the screenplay because it's like reading a technical drawing of a building yet to be built. And the closer it is to something... there are some filmmakers in the audience who are nodding because in a way the thing that makes you most suspicious of a film... if it's a good read as a screenplay. What you want is a difficult read where you feel an imagination which is going way off the page and into a sense of a three-dimensional artefact. Films shouldn't read well, they shouldn't be beautifully written and the preponderance of intension expressed through dialogue... because I don't quite share your own misanthropy about current filmmaking - I can't because I'm still trying to do it - but also because I look at a movie like Eternal Sunshine [of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry, 2004] which for all its - perhaps it's not 100 per cent successful minute by minute as a film - it's such a magnificent sense of trying to corral the new and corral new ways of telling a story, new ways of using narrative and film language.

DT: Absolutely.

AM: It's exciting, it feels like there's a generation of people who are going to come and say 'enough of all this "let's sit down and I'll tell you a story," I'm going to throw you into a story and you're going to have to... in the same way as a Surrealist, you're going to have to work it out a little bit.

DT: You're absolutely right.

AM: So I feel comforted by that and... one more question. Gentleman at the back.

Audience member: [inaudible...]

DT: There's a picture on the cover of my book of Rita Hayworth who, for much of her career, was a major star at Columbia, and to get permission for that picture, the publisher called Sony, who now own Columbia... got through to the rights department and the person in the rights department had not heard of Rita Hayworth. [laughter] I think it's forgotten already and one of the sad things about The Aviator, I thought, was that nothing on screen would lead you to want to become acquainted with Jean Harlow or Ava Gardner. They were as poorly rendered on film, I thought... as Cate Blanchett at least gives an extraordinarily intelligent impersonation because she's a very smart actress. The Ava Gardner in the TV version of the Frank Sinatra story [Sinatra, James Sadwith, 1992] - played, I think by Marcia Gay Harden - was much closer to the real Ava Gardner. And you felt she had studied the films and really knew what it was about. I think the process of forgetting is getting faster and faster. And if it happens it happens. What is forgotten is forgotten. And a book like mine and many other books will be there, but I don't think there's any guarantee that any of this is going to be remembered.

AM: Well, this is Rita Hayworth and this is a great book and it will help us to remember for a bit longer, and thanks so much David Thomson for being with us this evening.

[applause]