With Warner Media merging with Discovery again in 2022 and consolidation inside the leisure trade on the rise ever since, many followers of TCM — which is owned by Warner — worry their favourite dwelling for cinema historical past would possibly fall sufferer to those drastic cuts. Thankfully the channel continues to glitter and shine just like the Hollywood of previous with filmmakers Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson jumping on board to help curate and increase recognition of the channel. With their assist, different administrators have additionally come aboard — Guillermo del Toro, Wes Anderson, and Jason Reitman to call a number of — providing their picks every month within the hopes of bringing in additional viewers and protecting the love for traditional cinema alive. This month’s curator is multi-hyphenate Viggo Mortensen, whose second directorial effort, “The Dead Don’t Hurt,” was launched at the moment.
In reflecting on his cinematic influences, Mortensen reached again to one of many heydays of Hollywood, calling upon maestro of the Western style John Ford and one in every of his most beloved footage, “Stagecoach” (1939).
“We can’t really talk about the western genre without talking about John Ford,” Mortensen stated, later including, “When you look at this movie now, you might be forgiven for thinking that these characters are cliches. This is where those kinds of characters originated and furthermore, John Ford handles them really well. None of the characters — in a way — end up being or doing what you expect them to do.”
Continuing this pattern of movies that discover conflicted characters performing in methods chances are you’ll not count on them to, Mortensen acknowledges the work of Argentinian filmmaker Carlos Hugo Christenson and his nightmarish fairytale film “If I Should Die Before I Wake” (1952).
“This movie is a disturbing sort of fairytale told from the point of view of a young boy named Lucho, whose father is a policeman. Lucho’s a bit of a prankster, kind of a class clown at the beginning of the story. I won’t ruin the movie for you, but there’s been several young girls about Lucho’s age that have disappeared recently in the area and the last of these to disappear is a friend of Lucho’s,” stated Mortensen. Later he added, “It might make you think of ‘Hansel & Gretel.’ Might remind you of Fritz Lang’s ‘M.’ And in some sense — in terms of its imagery and its tone, the suspense and so forth — it reminded me of Charles Laughton’s ‘Night of the Hunter’ as well.”
In shouting out Agnes Varda’s “La Pointe Courte,” Mortensen was reminded of a private expertise he shared with the late director and the way she influenced his personal course of when it got here to transferring to the opposite facet of the digicam lens. Mortensen recalled, “I used to be fortunate sufficient to satisfy her in direction of the top of her life and it was shortly earlier than I directed my first film and she or he requested me what I used to be as much as, what I used to be gonna do subsequent, and I stated, ‘Well, I’m gonna direct my first film.’ And she stated, ‘Oh good, make sure you don’t present the viewers something.’ And I stated, ‘It’s a visible medium, what do you imply don’t present the viewers something?’ And she stated, ‘What I mean is don’t present them, however create in them — by advantage of your storytelling expertise — a need to see issues. Don’t present them. Make them need to see for themselves.’’
Mortensen’s final decide is a hidden gem from 1979 known as “The Great Santini.” The actor/director stated of the movie, “This movie is special. It’s kind of a twisted comedy, but it has some intense confrontation scenes, especially between father and son, played by Robert Duvall and Michael O’Keefe. It’s a movie that when I first saw it, I was really impressed by the acting from Duvall, O’Keefe, but also Blythe Danner.”
Hear extra from Mortensen on his picks within the video above.
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