Blade Runners, Deer Hunters and Blowing The Bloody Doors Off

Deeley Mouthed Reporter

Blade Runners, Deer Hunters and Blowing The Bloody Doors Off -
My Life In Cult Movies
by Michael Deeley with Matthew Field
The History Press
ISBN: 978-0750985925

This is another great book which was a Christmas present and, I have to say that, of the many non-fiction books about the film industry I’ve read in the last 10 years or so, this one has got the least amount of factual errors in it that I’ve seen. I couldn’t find a one in here which, frankly, make’s a change for the modern market of people writing about the movies. Admittedly, the book is a little bit of a blur of projects in places and doesn’t really take the time and stop for all the little details you might like (what book on a similar subject does?) but two big thumbs up to Mr. Deeley for being a straight talking guy with his words here.

Now, I don’t know too much about Michael Deeley (still don’t, in a way, his personal life barely comes up in this account) and neither do I know too much about the art of producing movies (although I learned some good stuff from this book). However, since he’s responsible for being the main producer of my favourite film ever (Blade Runner) I thought it was about time I found out what I could about the craft of what is, basically, putting together deals and creating the environment for a specific motion picture project to flourish while enabling the director to be able to do what’s required in any way you can. And it seems Deeley is the person to listen to here because he’s produced some of the best of them... although it’s interesting to note that many of them were less than big successes when they first opened.

Perhaps this is why Mr. Deeley has chosen to use the horrible term ‘cult movies’ in his title, although it’s quite honestly clear in a certain passage in his text that he really knows the uselessness, changeability and ultimate redundancy of the term when applied to cinema... I suspect he just threw it into the title due to the fact that it’s mere utterance can produce an almost orgasmic reaction from the more naive of film fans and thus increase sales. That being said, many of the films he has on his books such as The Italian Job, Don’t Look Now, The Wicker Man, The Man Who Fell To Earth and, of course, Blade Runner, do have a very loyal following of admirers, although nowadays in much higher numbers than could ever justify anyone calling them cult films, it has to be said.

Deeley seems, from the way he writes, to be a fairly pleasant man with a lot of stories to tell which, I suspect, didn’t all make it into the book for various reasons. He speaks well of most people he’s worked with but always says things straight... so you won’t read much of a good word for his experiences wrangling Sam Pekinpah on his production of Convoy, for instance. And as for Michael Cimino and his time producing the spiralling production of what eventually became The Deer Hunter... well lets just say that he goes to great length, in the most pleasant manner possible, to point out what a terrible human being that director is... repeatedly and at length, whether he’s meant to be talking about him or not. So that says something about the kind of man he is, I think. I don’t know this but I got the feeling that he was being legally pulled back on saying much of what he wanted to say about certain people but still managed to find a way of getting it out there anyway... which is to his credit, I think. He also has a word or two to say about Julia Ormond as a presence on set but... yeah... you need to read this book yourself if you want to find this stuff out.

As can be expected, the book is full of stories from his times on films with the likes of Michael Caine and Ridley Scott and... also people who were partnered up with him to produce movies, notably Stanley Baker. He tells of the way their producing relationship finished and the tragedy of how Baker actually died, somewhat prematurely. As well as, throughout the book, little stories about other less than fortunate people in the business... such as the stuntman who damaged his leg on a shoot and, when taken to hospital, had the misfortune of having the wrong leg accidentally amputated.

The book has a good lead in and starts off with Mr. Deeley describing both the sheer boredom and tension inherent in having to go to an Oscar ceremony because you have been nominated for something. From there on the book takes a mostly chronological path from his early, post army days to his first jobs within the film industry and beyond. And on the way he drops various names and anecdotes of his adventures in the film trade, from refusing to give in to Warren Beatty’s requests to remove Julie Christie’s sex scene from Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now to defending his cuts to The Wicker Man with the, frankly very reasonable explanation, that if he hadn’t cut it like that to the demands of the people who were distributing it, then the film would never had found its way on to screens at all. In fact, nobody would distribute it in the US at all until Roger Corman allowed it to screen as a double bill with Don’t Look Now (when similar cuts were required to The Wicker Man to secure the deal).

Perhaps my favourite anecdote is of a disasterous private screening in the 1960s or early 1970s of a new film by Joseph Losey. I’m not going to tell you what happened here because that would spoil it but... Michael Caine certainly saved the day on that one. And, of course, I was ravenous for any more information I could find on Blade Runner and, although I knew much of this stuff before when it comes to this movie, it’s interesting to read of how it developed and just which concepts were there and, well, which were not there during the production of the film. It’s clear Deeley also knows how important this film is (and I think he calls it his favourite project at one point) because he takes a few chapters to talk about it which is, roughly, two and a half chapters more than he takes to talk about any of the other productions, it seemed to me.

I also like that he taylored his writing to that movie by the end of the novel too. In his last section, which I believe must be a new addition to this hardback edition because he’s talking about things from 2016, including his thoughts on Ridley Scott's Alien sequel and the, then, upcoming Blade Runner sequel, he uses a few adapted key phrases including the lovely paraphrase... “I don’t know how many years celluloid has left? Who does?” Actually, come to think of it, if you don’t know the original cut of Blade Runner which was released back in cinemas in 1982, before the advent of the various, so called director’s cuts of the movie, then the average modern reader might not pick up on some of those little writing flourishes either. Which is a shame because he’s shown a lot of love for the project here.

And that’s me done on the great Micheal Deeley’s Blade Runners, Deer Hunters and Blowing The Bloody Doors Off... one of the most British of movie books I’ve read but also one of the most enlightening. Definitely check this one out if you are interested in any of the directors or movies mentioned here... Michael has a story about most of them.

Under The Skin

Skin And Bare It

Under The Skin
2014 UK
Directed by Jonathan Glazer
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Under The Skin is one of those films that exists in a certain space in cinema which allows you to bring your own baggage with you and create your own interpretations of what is going on within the material as it’s presented to you, to a certain degree. Films like this have a special, almost “Holy” place in cinema and they also tend to divide audiences quite heavily... at least that's what I usually observe. I saw two new cinema releases this weekend and both of these films had this kind of interpretive quality to them. However, the other one I saw failed in its intent spectacularly, in my opinion, because the message which I brought to/took from it seemed to be way less than the sum of its parts and the frames were, typically for the director of this other movie, crowded with ideas and details but... it all just felt like a lot of chaos for very little reward or insight at the end of it. I’ll get to all that in my review of that film when I write it. Check back here in a day or two for that one.

As far as Under The Skin goes, I think the qualities I just highlighted worked so well because the action of the characters and the space in which the actors performed them was, mostly, calm and tranquil, allowing the experience to very slowly let you explore what you think you are seeing in the movie. So much so, in fact, that some of the key sequences were deliberately uncluttered in what I personally believe were the language of metaphor rather than actual reality... although the film's director did have a tendency to keep upending my deductions of such matters as I was watching and, in one quite spectacular sequence, where a man’s internal organs, muscles and bones are very quickly extracted from his body, leaving only his skin floating around, I was forced to even question the nature of those similar scenes I had been viewing.

The always watchable Scarlett Johansson plays an alien creature who “wears” the skin of other people and uses this as a disguise, drifting from peron to person and place to place as a, for want of a better term, predator. She is not necessarily a sexual predator (I haven’t read the original novel on which this was based and, having seen this, now wish I had before I saw the movie, actually) but she uses the language, both minimally verbal and physically, of human sexuality to pick up her prey. She then devours them in a what I can only assume, in spite of a couple of sequences bordering on the cheerful art of the non sequitur for me, is a metaphor for the storage and consumption of human beings (represented by a black room with somebody undressing and following the disrobing Johansson, then slowly sinking step by step into a bizarre and dreamlike liquid storage state, before being eaten later).

The film, I am glad to say, was very minimal in dialogue throughout, which I prefer as I still tend to see cinema as a visually dominant form of art (although, bearing in mind my love of scoring, I really shouldn’t still feel this way). To ignore the music and sound design of this film, however, which at times become almost interchangeable as an ambient noise, probably created purely by the composer,  slowly creeps into the realm of sinister and unsettling music... would be a big mistake. While not technically atonal, the score still has the kind of power to both make you feel less at ease in places... it’s always pushed to the front of the sound mix in the “eating” sequences... and to tell you what’s coming next with an almost leitmotif style running through it, even though thematically it seems almost as alien as this film’s central character.

Starting off with Johansson discovering and practicing human vocalisations, which make important the world of sound to a certain extent, the character of the alien takes on a journey through the film where, if read one way, “she” becomes more humanistic as she is, perhaps, polluted by the sometimes troubled souls with whom she comes into contact. The director cannily punctuates the long stretches of calm, stealth and exploration which characterises the majority of the movie, with occasional stabs of sound and sometimes action which shock by their highlights in isolation, the way that somebody like Tarkovsky or Bergman may have chosen to highlight something within the overall consuming style of one of their works, perhaps. A sudden lively burst of conversation, a violent mob or a hardcore, aggressively lit dance club are all thrown into the mix as the main protagonist/antagonist, depending on how much you can identify with her, goes about her daily/nightly business. The visceral shock of these moments, which hit you like a muffled, comfortably wrapped, crash to your senses amidst a barren, meandering journey allows you, the audience, as a human spectator, to empathise with the way the character is able to handle these sudden changes in tempo and, if you’re like me, come closer to her viewpoint. Which I’m guessing was the director’s plan?

The film is adult in nature, at least in terms of there being tonnes of nudity and allusions to sexuality, but lit quite muddily in places... which lifts what could have been a gaudy, exploitative entertainment (and there’s nothing wrong with that) into something much more restrained and expressive of the kind of existence depicted here. Interestingly, because of the underlying nature of the creature’s easy target of human sexuality, and the kinds of people “she” has to plunder to sustain her on this planet (although there’s no real indication she is of extra-terrestrial origin, to be honest), the irony is that we learn as much, probably more, about the nature of the human condition from Johansson’s journey through it, than we do of the origin of her species and her purpose here other than just existing and eating. Again, I may or may not get more of that equation from the novel. And, of course, the irony is that she, too, seems to be growing to a new relationship with her encounters with humanity... and her final fate, which I certainly won’t reveal here, is a symptom of the naivety of not approaching such a changeable and unpredictable species such as humanity without a certain amount of caution and distrust.

Under The Skin is, I have to say, a film which I couldn’t fully comprehend on my first viewing, mainly due to the fact that I was trying to apply a certain logic to the visual metaphor and its final conclusions with certain characters. For example, the lack of the central character’s blindness to the condition of another character she encounters, said everything about her alien outlook but the final fate of this character seemed at odds with what I’d seen before, unless you see Johansson’s slow descent as one of empathy rather than consumption of something that didn’t agree with her digestive system (as I was initially taking this for as I watched).

I went into the cinema thinking that this would be a kind of female-centric version of Nicholas Roeg’s movie adaptation The Man Who Fell To Earth (reviewed here) and, although the films are as different as chalk and cheese, the otherworldliness of the central characters and the way they are depicted without any judgements made by the roving “camera eye” is certainly something which the two films have in common. Under The Skin would certainly go well as the second part of a double feature with Roeg’s classic, for sure.

At times inscrutable, at times simplistic but always emotionally engaging, Under The Skin is probably one of the better films you’ll see in a cinema environment this year... so if you are a lover of the art form of film then it would probably not be something you’d consider missing. Certainly, in my case, it’ll probably lead to harder things... like multiple viewings and reading the original novel by Michel Faber. So catch this one if you can.

Earthward Bound

The Man Who Fell To Earth

1976 UK Directed by Nicholas Roeg

I recently won a competition run by Simon and Laraine Gosden of Fantasticliterature.com (does what it says on the tin... a great site, you should check it out) with the prize being a film of my choice in the recent Science Fiction season at the National Film Theatre (courtesy of the BFI, with thanks to Victoria Humphrys). For my prize I picked The Man Who Fell To Earth as a good movie from my past to revisit.

It’s been a few years since I last watched this (and around about 20 years since I last saw it at the NFT) but this is just one of those movies which never seems to date much. I’ve always admired Roeg as a director and enjoy his fast shock-cut techniques to make metaphors and cross-cut through past and future to build up a slow picture of what is going on in a less linear and, perhaps, more naturalistic fashion. I’ve always compared his movies to one of those polaroid self-developing photos which were predominant in the 70s and 80s... slowly, as the time passes, you see the whole picture fading in to view at once... that’s pretty much what happens in a Roeg movie. All the different fragments that make up the whole of the picture develop at roughly the same rate and give you a whole vision slowly forming in your head... a brilliant way of delivering your vision. I think the last thing I saw directed by Roeg was an episode of the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and I remember him getting away with great stuff like that even in this “prime-time” TV kinda venue... still recall the quick flashes into Mata Hari’s ultimate fate even though you knew the episode would not go that far forward into the character’s future lives.

Actually, that’s one of the things which surprised me and which I’d misremembered when I went to this screening last weekend... there are no “flash-forwards” in The Man Who Fell To Earth that I could see... just various flashback sequences to Bowie’s character’s past... so in many ways this is possibly one of the most linear of Roeg’s movies that I’ve seen... or at least one of the most accessible maybe.

Another thing Roeg does in this movie is to play with extreme levels of sound... using it in much the same way as Kurosawa might have used it (look at Kurosawa’s snow-demon sequence in Dreams and you’ll see what I mean). Sequences of multi-screen, ear splitting, headache inducing chaos are jarred against scenes of quiet and the contemplation of solitude. This is a film which never gets boring and never seems as much as its 139 minute running time. This is something which, handled by a lesser artist than Roeg, might well start to drag after a short while but keeping the attention of the audience has never been a problem for Roeg.

Bowie’s acting is surefooted, assured, very casual in its impact and it’s very hard to believe that this was one of his first roles. And it fits right in with the, almost lazy, pacing of the movie. It’s a rambling movie, even in it’s jarring and chaotic sequences, of which there are a few. I really like movies like this which get to an ending eventually but which seem in no hurry to connect any dots or employ “cause and effect” editing of narrative sequences which is something which perhaps a lot of modern American movies seem to want to do. The Man Who Fell To Earth has a much more European feel to it... well it is British I guess.

Criterion do a really wonderful Region 1 DVD of this but it’s just gone out of print... at the time of writing though it’s still in stock at places like Amazon.com so it’s worth tracking down if you’ve never seen this absolutely stunning, vision of a movie before.