Directors recall joys, horrors of first films

AS we know from decades of both anecdotes and common sense, film directing is a uniquely challenging art form. Some of the disciplines that feed into it, including poetry, fiction and, of course, screenwriting, can be done with simply a pencil, pad of paper and a light source, while shooting even a short narrative film requires time, money and the marshaling of a number of specialists.

And that’s not the hardest part. What it of course first requires -- to be done right -- is a vision. And in between that vision and its execution, a director requires an iron will and a certain hubris.

Both in Stephen Lowenstein’s first, much-praised collection of “My First Movie” and in this equally rewarding second sampling, those two key ingredients are much highlighted as he discusses directors’ first significant movies. As Richard Linklater puts it in discussing “Slacker,” “I mean, you need good qualities, talent and so forth, but you need bad qualities, too. Tolstoy said that about his older brother, Nicholas. He said he was every bit the artist Tolstoy was, but he didn’t possess all the necessary bad qualities.”

Or ask Serbian director Emir Kusturica, whose summation of what a first film means is “its sincerity is unrepeatable. It’s like a first love. How can you repeat a first love?” and who feels that “making a movie is the slowest way to commit suicide.”

Lowenstein’s format has a useful regularity and always includes as much biographical underpinning as he can draw out. Thus Kusturica’s first filmic experience was shoveling coal in a Sarajevo cinematheque, Japanese director Takeshi Kitano (“Violent Cop”) was part of a stand-up duo in an obscure-to-Americans comic discipline. Shekhar Kapur was a son of privilege who eventually gave up his fancy London apartment and sports car to return to Bombay and starve as an actor before making “Masoom” (“Innocent”) in a departure from the Bollywood style he’d grown up with.

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who tossed away a thriving career as a commercials director to make “Amores Perros,” talks about the leap of faith -- in a surprising majority of the cases here, it includes a period of personal impoverishment -- that let him set to work on his under-budgeted debut: “I think innocence is more powerful than experience by far -- and I know that by experience!”

Inarritu recalls how he was determined to make “a film that smells,” much as his closest artistic cousin in these pages, Kusturica, says, “I think most of the time a movie attacks the subconscious of its audience.” Both men -- arguably the most brilliant auteurs among a potent group -- show a zest in their language that replicates that of their films. “I never stopped being a child,” is how Kusturica puts it. Anyone who’s watched Steven Spielberg shoot -- perched by the monitor chawing on one finger, with a relentless zeal for invention -- could vouch for a certain childlike streak as a fine qualification for directing. (Of course, Spielberg’s calling card “Duel” was a dauntingly perfected, almost airtight shooter’s exercise that seems like anything but child’s play.)

Having covered some fascinating, preponderantly based in the U.S and Western Europe big shots among the 20 subjects in his first book, such as the Coen brothers, Stephen Frears, Barry Levinson, Oliver Stone and Neil Jordan (with not a little spice from the likes of Bertrand Tavernier, Mira Nair, Pedro Almodovar and Ang Lee), Lowenstein set a different agenda here: half as many subjects, through whom he “would try to shine a light on various filmmaking worlds -- such as those of India, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe -- a little farther from the epicenter of the global industry in Los Angeles.” Even two of the more mainstream choices -- the American gone Brit satirist Terry Gilliam and the Brit turned U.S. social diarist Sam Mendes -- qualify as mavericks.

The author also sets out to, as he puts it, “pursue various hares that had been set running by the first book.” Several of his earlier interviewees had described how “Slacker” was a source of inspiration, and he wanted to contrast the Bollywood-schooled Kapur (now best known for “Elizabeth”) with Nair, who apprenticed in documentaries stateside.

He did his Kusturica interview during a terrifying ride through the country (He may be fast, but he’s very safe, the director assured him of their driver), and Richard Kelly failed to turn up for a promised second session. (It’s tempting to liken that to the “Donnie Darko” director’s sophomore slump with “Southland Tales,” though his interview, like each one here, is absorbing reading.) Kelly wrote “Donnie Darko” in “a fit of anxiety,” did time assisting Oliver Stone, worked in a postproduction house “making cappuccinos on Madonna and all those people,” but kept faith that “a good screenplay doesn’t go away.”

There are moments of abject humility: “I think I was satisfied with one scene,” says Inarritu of his first TV pilot, and Kitano recalls that when a Japanese crowd used to him in comedies saw him debut as a dramatic actor in “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,” “every single person in the cinema bust into laughter.”

For any filmmaker, and in fact for anyone who loves films, this book is richly readable. You may find Lukas Moodysson a bit arrogant when he says of Ingmar Bergman, “There are some artists I really have to wrestle with, and I don’t think he’s one of them,” but the level of candor throughout is a tribute to the interviewing skills of Lowenstein, himself a filmmaker. There’s more casual poetry in this slim volume than in all the reviews you’ll read this year. Let Kapur have the last word in describing the job of the director: “It’s more aggression than spontaneity . . . part of our problem -- all of us, including me -- is that we get so afraid of chaos that we get addicted to structure. Because we are afraid of the infinite.”

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Fred Schruers writes the entertainment blog “Hollywood Deal” for Portfolio.com