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.

End Game

Eleven Of The Most 
Powerful Movie Endings

Okay then people... look at the title of this article. That pretty much implies spoilers are going to be present, right? So you’ve been duly warned I’m going to just be discussing the final moments of these movies here. There’s no excuse for you to come moaning at me about this later on then, okay?

Proceed at your own risk...

11. Seven Samurai (1954)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Four of the seven protagonists lay dead and the surviving three look at their funeral mounds with the fallen warrior’s swords sticking up from them. The youngest of the three does not, as initially planned, go with the other two. He runs off to be with the woman he loves and to live the life of a farmer. Depending on which English translation you watch, Kambei, the leader of the seven, brilliantly played by acting legend Takashi Shimura, says “The farmers have won. Not us.”, signifying his acceptance of the throwaway nature of the ronin and their place as people outcast from society once their purpose is served. You then, perhaps, remember the armour which the farmers have “accumulated” over the years and the implications as to how they came into its possession, and realise the truth alongside these two remaining survivors.

10. Solaris (1972)
Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky
After his adventures on the space station, we find Kris, the main protagonist, is back on earth at his fathers house in a series of shots designed to recall the opening of the movie. However, when Kris goes inside the house we are soon aware something is very wrong because, like the small detail of not simulating buttons on the various replicas of Kris’ dead wife’s dress, rain starts to fall inside the house... not outside. We pull back miles to find that Kris’ dad’s house and surrounding land is actually replicated on Solaris. Is Kris really there or is this a copy of Kris? Indeed, was the opening of the film also set on Solaris instead of Earth and we just didn’t know (after all, the space flight is not seen and the metaphor of a long car journey is used to imply the emotional bleakness of the trip into space)? Once you start to think about this ending... you start to go down tangents and corridors you didn’t expect to travel. Welcome to... Solaris.

9. Kill List (2011)
Directed by Ben Wheatley
Okay... so this movie ending is powerful not because it takes you by surprise in any way. If you’ve made it through to the end of this sometimes harrowing movie, you will probably have figured out the dual identity of the not so mysterious “hunchback” mentioned in the final chapter title. You probably know the main protagonist is going to end up accidentally killing his wife and little boy so that, in itself, is no big deal. The real power in the ending is not the “what the heck just happened” of the last scene but the “why the heck did it happen” element of it. The sheer “this makes no sense” ingredient of this sequence which makes you want to immediately go back and watch it again to decipher the clues so you can figure out just what is going on all the way through the movie, is what makes it so damned resonant in the mind. Even though, I believe, the little breadcrumbs scattered through the movie are just one big, inscrutable tease to keep you hooked on the unanswerable puzzle element of the movie. A bit mind blowing the first time you watch it.
I reviewed Kill List here. 

8. Betty Blue 
aka 37°2 le matin (1986)
Directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix
After Betty finally succumbs to her inevitable nervous breakdown, she pokes her own eye out and flips over the edge into madness and catatonia. Her lover finally finds a way to sneak into hospital and put her out of her misery by smothering her with a pillow. When he returns home he finds that Betty’s dream of him becoming a successful writer starts to pay off. While writing his next novel, he glances at his new companion, a cat, and we hear Betty talking to him in his mind, as though she has become the cat. We realise Betty will be inside his head forever.


7. The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Directed by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez
Lots of running around as the surviving two “camera eye” kids run around the strange house, presumably belonging to the Blair Witch. As heroine Heather is jumped/knobbled by “something bad” and the camera drops to the ground, we see the other survivor, Mike, standing away from camera with his face in the corner of the room.... which goes right back to a reference in an interviewee’s report of the Blair Witch legend from right at the start of the movie. Now the film has ended, the slaughter is about to begin. This ending really seems to grab people by the throat and I remember seeing a midnight performance of the film in Barnet when it first came out, and a dazed and puzzled stranger I’d never met before came up to ask me about what the ending all meant because he couldn’t make head nor tail of it. It packs quite a wallop the first time around.

6. The Last Broadcast (1998)
Directed by Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler
An absolutely genius of a film, not least because I actually didn’t see the end coming until about 30 seconds before it actually happens. A cameraman is recruited by two local cable access TV personalities to accompany them into a forest in search of the legendary Jersey Devil... but only the new guy returns alive and is assumed to be their killer. A local movie maker starts to make a documentary film integrating the huge amount of footage, some badly deteriorated,  the two dead men recorded in the hopes of learning more about what bizarre happenings took place. The film maker talks you through things and at the end of the film, he is talking directly to the audience while a woman is computer cleaning and enhancing footage which is about to, hopefully, reveal what really happened to the two men. Then she, in the background, discovers the key to the mystery... tries to escape but, to no avail. The documentary filmmaker kills her in grizzly fashion, just like it turns out he killed the two men, dumps her body in the forest, and then calmly continues narrating his documentary. This is totally unexpected and, because of the performances, is not something you are going to forget in a hurry.

5. The Shining (1980)
Directed by Stanley Kubrik
At number 5 I’ve picked the first of two Stephen King “adaptations” for this selection. The ends of both those adaptations were pretty much added on by the filmmakers and didn’t end this way in King’s original source material.

In this version of The Shining, after going mad in the Overlook Hotel and terrorising his wife and kid, Jack Torrance is dead and frozen in the “snowed up” snowy snow. All fine and dandy, but then, right at the movies last shot, we focus on a photograph of people at the hotel from way-back-when old timey days (well, maybe it was just the twenties, I forget) while a period song is rendered seriously spooky by its juxtaposition with this chilling shot.

Why is it chilling and powerful?

Because the picture includes Jack Torrance as one of the people in the photograph? What’s going on? Has the house claimed his soul and whacked him into the photo as a keepsake? Or was he always a guest there and always fated to come back to the hotel in various incarnations? Who knows? Probably not Kubrik, I’m guessing, who successfully manages to bugger up your mind here if you think about it too hard... um... I mean, the inherent paradox will be vaguely disturbing as you ponder all its multiple possibilities and variant riffs. Either way... this movie stays with you after because of this beautifully unsettling coda.

4. The Mist (2007)
Directed by Frank Darabont
And coming right at ya, we have the other Stephen King adaptation in this list...

After being terrorised by bizarre monsters all through the novella, the main protagonist and his son drive off into The Mist in search of a possible hopeful haven from their trouble. In Frank Darabont’s movie version though, it’s a gazillion times more bleaker than that. After the main protagonist David, his son Billy and their two companions, find David and Billy’s gorily dead wife/mother who they have been trying ot get back to all movie, the four decide that there’s going to be no help coming from the impossible world-changing terror which has struck. So, they decide to end it all as they still have some rounds left in the hand pistol they brought with them. However, there are only three bullets for the four of them. David volunteers to figure something out after he’s dispatched them all and he kills all three of them, including his own son, one shot apiece. In his grief, he barrels out of the car and keeps firing empty chambers into his own head... in time to see “the cavalry” arrive in the form of the military who have rescued all of the people who were left holed up in the supermarket in which they’d spent most of the film hiding. If he’d just waited another few minutes... all of them would have been saved. The accompanying vocal wailings by Lisa Gerrard on a special film version of the Dead Can Dance track The Host Of Seraphim just emphasises the utter pointlessness and bitter tragedy of this final, haunting sequence.

3. The Wicker Man (1973)
Directed by Robin Hardy
This is actually not one of my favourite movies, although I will give it another look someday in the not so distant future in case I change my mind. Throughout the film, Edward Woodward investigates strange occurrences in a village where, it turns out, everyone is into a pagan-istic, devil worshipping style kind of groove. Woodward’s character is seized by the villagers at the end and dragged to be burned inside a large Wicker Man as the piece de resistance of their annual ritual. As he’s dragged closer to realise the danger, the audience is waiting for the obvious deus ex machina which will free our hero and allow him to punish his persecutors... but instead, he is put inside the Wicker Man and burned alive, screaming for the religious deity who has forsaken him, without intervention. End of movie! Scarifyingly powerful stuff... especially if you’re not expecting it.

2. The Great Silence (1968)
Directed by Sergio Corbucci
Well this really takes the biscuit for completely gloomy endings and was banned in a lot of countries (I think here in the UK too) for a couple of decades until it started getting screenings again. I first saw it screened under the title The Big Silence, as part of Alex Cox’s Moviedrome season on BBC2, back in the day.

The mute, title character of Silence is played by famous French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant as he tries to save the rag tag bunch of so-called “outlaws” in a small community from the evil bounty killer Loco, played by Klaus Kinski. The film is both bleak and beautiful in that it’s a snow bound Spaghetti Western with a wonderful score by Ennio Morricone, but the ending really kicks you in the gut. Silence is wounded and has fallen for the woman who has asked him to avenge her dead husband, unfairly killed by Loco. They now form a romantic bond but Loco and his men have got all the so-called outlaws, who are really the victims, tied up in the saloon in order to coax Silence out of his hiding place. Silence, our hero, goes to save the day... his new girlfriend follows him. As he approaches the saloon and he and Klaus face off for a Leone-style staring match, one of the bad guys shoots Silence through both hands so he can’t fire the snazzy automatic Mauser pistol he’s been using all through the film. After a bit more Morricone backed staring, evil Loco shoots our hero dead. The girlfriend runs into the scene to avenge him, and she is promptly shot dead too. Then, all the tied up victims in the bar are massacred by the bounty killers. The bad guys win all the way on this one and it’s a scene which stays with you a long time after your first viewing.

In recent years an alternate ending which was shot, possibly to appease some countries censors, was found. I don’t think it’s known if this ending was ever used in any territories but it deserves a brief mention because of the sheer preposterousness of what happens in this alternate take in the face of everything else that’s happened in the movie leading towards this scene. In this version, Silence is shot in the hands like before but as Klaus Kinski goes to finish him off, the “funny sheriff” played by the late, great Frank Wolff, rides in out of the blue on a horse to shoot Loco... even though he was quite definitively seen going to his death earlier in the film. Silence then also bursts into life, seemingly unaffected by the hand shooting, jumps into the saloon and kills all the bad guys. All the good guys are saved and Silence’s girlfriend undoes the bandages on his hand to reveal that he is wearing half a knight's metal gauntlett around his hand, presumably as a mini reference to the plate of metal Clint Eastwood wears under his poncho in A Fistful of Dollars, and they all live happily ever after. It goes without saying though, that if the film had been released with this silly ending, the film would not be remembered and kept alive with much the same enthusiasm that genre fans have done over the years.

If you’re not expecting that original ending... it’s a pretty powerful conclusion to a movie.

1. The Third Man (1949)
Directed by Carol Reed
And my number one pick is perhaps less “in your face” than any of my other choices... although it’s more powerful than any of the endings I’ve mentioned so far...

Harry Lime (Orson Welles) is dead and our hero Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton), who has been pining over Harry’s ex-girlfriend all the movie, as played by Valli, is waiting for her as she walks down a long street away from Harry’s second funeral of the movie. As she walks towards the camera, with Cotton waiting at the side of the screen, in a long unbroken shot accompanied by Anton Karas’ beautiful zither music, we hope she will forgive Holly for shooting his old friend and her ex-lover dead, and embrace the uncertain future which Holly may be able to offer her. Instead, she completely blanks him and continues walking past both him and then the camera... a sad ending to an absolutely brilliant movie and my pick for the most powerfully moving end sequence of all time. I never knew the old Vienna...

Kill List

The Big Kill

Kill List 2011 UK

Directed by Ben Wheatley

Screening at UK cinemas

Although I’m not going to talk about specific story details of anything that takes place after the first half of this movie has played out...it’s really hard to talk about the kind of film Kill List actually is without at least spoiling the surprise of what it turns out to be. So, if like me, you managed to stay away from all the publicity this one garnered at certain festivals and on Twitter and you think Kill List is just another British crime thriller... you might want to turn back at this point and go see it totally blind like I did.

If you’re still with me I’d like to start off by saying that Kill List reminded me of two things when it comes to the art and craft of movie making. Two things that, I have to say, are rarely a given any more with modern cinema.

Number one is... movies can be very powerful. They can ooze a certain degree of thought-influencing juju from the very pores of their celluloid skin. Number two is... sometimes the power of a movie is not in what is shown on screen, but lies with what is not shown on screen. Kill List is very much an exponent of movies which have these kinds of qualities in spades.

The film starts off as very much a character study of domestic tension between a husband and wife and their little boy. The husband Jay (played by Neil Maskell) and the wife Shel (played by MyAnna Buring, who horror genre fans might recognise from her role as one of the girls in The Descent movies... the first of which was excellent) are at the end of their rope pretty much. The money has run out and Jay hasn’t got a job since his days of soldiering went horribly wrong in an unspecified manner. When his also ex-soldier mate Gal (played by Michael Smiley who was Tyres in Spaced and who I was trying really hard to “place” all through the duration of the film) comes to dinner with his new girlfriend in tow the domestic tensions spill over and it really gets quite hard to watch for a while there.

Think of the reality that someone like Mike Leigh would spin on this kind of material and you’d be half there to the “in your face-ness” of it all... but Wheatley has a very interesting cinematic style. I mentioned about the power of a movie sometimes coming from what’s not shown and this director has this edited in such a way that, although you can strongly feel the emotional impact of the characters and know where that’s at (due to some truly magnificent performances), things are kind of peered at in little sections and spliced together so what you actually get is an impression of who these people are, and it’s a very deep impression, without actually knowing much of anything about them. Gal has brought Jay the possibility of a job working with him and it’s only after a while that you realise the job that Jay is being talked into picking up is as a hitman, which seems to be something the two have done before.

Wheatley does some other interesting things with sound here to make you really feel the “authenticity” of the scenario and he makes use of overlapping soundtrack spills between scenes to shift you along... but it’s even more interesting than usual when he does this because he quite often uses the sound of a completely different emotional state overlapping... or rather grating... against the visual images. So an image of deep depression and tension can suddenly have the sound of fun and laughter on the soundtrack for 7 or 8 seconds before you are suddenly thrust into the next sequence where the sound matches up. The emotional juxtaposition actually seems to punch the pace of the film up so it feels like its hurtling along when, in reality, not much really happens for that first half an hour. There’s even a shot where he does this visually in one hit without a sound enhancement where Jay and Shel are in a sad and contemplative mood at the foreground of a shot while Gal and his “mysterious new girlfriend” are cavorting wildly in the background.

He does something else very clever with sound in a few sequences too but I’ll get to that later. Another great thing this director does visually is not shy away from contemplation... characters seen alone and with their thoughts for chunks of time give a real emotional impact and it’s quite a strange feeling to be manipulated to empathising this closely with characters whom you know nothing about. There are some great shots of MyAnna Buring on her own within a frame which take on almost Bermannesque status in their visual intensity and emotional colouring.

And then you get your first clue that the rest of the movie is not going to be as straight forward as it looks when Gals new girlfriend is alone in the bathroom and scratches a symbol, the same symbol seen in the opening credit of the movie, into the back of her hosts wall mirror. Strange things are afoot.

And then Jay and Gal go to get the job from their new client, which is to kill three people on a list (The Priest, The Librarian and The Politician) but Jay is taken by surprise when their new boss slits both Jay's and his own hand open to seal the contract with blood. Things really begin to pick up a pace then as we see Jay and Gal staking out their victims and all the while we are beginning to slowly realise that the main protagonist really is quite psychotic. The first victim smiles at him as he goes to shoot him and when he gets upset and extracts information (which leads to much more extracurricular torture and killing as Jay goes up against some people he really doesn’t like) from the victim whom he is smashing up with a hammer, the victim is, amongst all the screams, thanking him for it. “I know who you are” he says to Jay at one point, showing that it’s an honour to be paid a visit by the man... Jay, of course, doesn’t know what’s going on and he keeps a lot of this to himself.

There are some really wonderfully bleak, almost Lynchian scenes here like the sequence where Gal goes into “enemy territory” with a shot gun to find out what the heck has happened to Jay. And this is where that second trick of sound comes in that I was talking about earlier... well I say trick, it’s an interesting technique which I’m sure I’ve seen/heard done before... I just happened to notice it last night. During certain scenes the director turns off the naturalistic sound and builds tension through an alternate soundtrack overlap... and not so much music but industrial noise almost. Kinda like something Alan R. Splet might have designed for Eraserhead. This is used to punch up the tension during certain sequences and it works really well. Kurosawa would do something similar with music and it’s juxtaposition against a sequence of naturalistic sound (think the big battle sequence in Ran)... Wheatley does it with ugly and uneasy sounds it seems to me.

There are some pretty violent scenes here and because of the way this one is shot, you are still kinda sympathising for Jay and Gal, even though Jay is doing some pretty dreadful things to his victims. And then, once you think you’ve got a handle on the kind of movie it is... things start kicking into high gear and you realise there’s something even more sinister going on. Each section of the movie, once "the job" is underway, is titled after the name of each “contract” and, by the time you get to “The Politician” and Jay has been sent “a message”, and by message I mean his cat is killed and strung up outside the door of the family home, you really start to wonder what kind of conclusion this film will have.

Well all I’m saying is that Mr. Ben Wheatley’s movie gets to point about 20 mins from the end and then it all starts to go a bit Mr. Dennis Wheatley for the finale. In fact, to not put too fine a point on it, this film is very much a modern equivalent of Robin Hardy’s cult classic The Wicker Man and, while the ending of this film is in some ways predictable (when a fourth caption comes up on screen as The Hunchback... you should have no problem working out the exact, dual identity of this persona) it is also vastly less penetrable than that aforementioned chiller.

When I came out of the cinema I came out thinking a few things. They were:

1. It’s not a horror film anymore than the supernaturally disguised giallo All The Colours Of The Dark is a horror.

2. That was unsettling.

3. I never have to watch this movie again in my life and

4. Why the f*** did that just happen? I’m as baffled as the lead character as to why any of that just occurred.

However, having lived with the memory of this film now for a day I’d have to say that I take back points 1 and 3. Because, just like The Wicker Man before it, there are little clues hidden all the way through this movie and I want to look at them again to see if they reveal anything. This movie might actually have a supernatural content to it but it’s alluded to quite subtly and there’s a slight possibility that this movie may be a horror movie after all. Frankly, I know the director has put those clues in, I’m sure, not to give me any closure but to deliberately make me think and ponder little moments and intricacies of a story which is, I think, designed to be baffling in some ways. And by doing so, he’s cleverly built a certain longevity into his movie which you won’t normally find in other contemporary fayre and it almost begs repeat viewings. This one definitely will have a passionate following for years to come... I won’t use the word “cult” because I believe that definition to be overused and transient in terms of its usefulness to film appreciation but, for a small amount of time it may well have a similar kind of status.

Either way you look at it, Kill List is to be applauded for being a truly powerful and thought-provoking movie amongst a sea of much more forgettable multiplex fodder. It truly gives me hope that the art of film is not completely dead and buried as yet. It’s an absolute must see for genuine cineastes, it has to be said, but be warned... some of you may find the way the scenes of violence are handled to be quite unsettling, if not disturbing, depending on how jaded a viewer you are. Easily one of the best crafted English language movies of the year and I take my hat* off to all involved.

*I don’t wear hats actually but if I did, I would raise it in the presence of this director as a sign of respect.