Film Courage: Bill, if you could pick five books that you would be allowed to read every
year and only those five books, what would they be?
Bill Duke, actor, director, author: Oh, Gosh.
I love books, Im just trying…five?
Man…
Film Courage: Sorry, I know that’s limiting.
Bill Duke: An Empire Of Their Own [Author Neal Gabler]
What is the book I always talk about?
[Bill turns to his assistant off-camera]?
1984 [Author George Orwell].
But the one about the mythology and all the major studio guys read this book, The Hero
With A Thousand Faces [Author Joseph Campbell].
That is an incredible book about all the stories of the world have a certain commonality, what
they are.
Steven Spielberg used it, [George] Lucas uses it, everybody uses it…The Hero’s Journey,
what is the hero’s journey?
And there is a commonality of every hero’s journey.
I read a book by Steven Pressfield that I read as often as I can and it’s called The
War of Art.
It’s a take off of Sun Tzu the Art of War.
And it talks about what is it that stops the average person from
accomplishing anything they want to accomplish.
The book is this thick [indicates a thin book] and the book pisses you off so bad because
from the first page you say to yourself “He’s talking about me.”
And he says the father and mother of incompetence is procrastination and the rationalizations
we come up with to justify a procrastination.
Hours and days of thinking of thinking why we are not doing it and justifying it instead
of doing it.
He says it’s easier to know the hand that is choking you then to let another hand in.
This has been choking me for years.
I’m not dead but you’re asking me to put another hand near me?
I don’t know this, I know this [imitates himself holding himself back around his neck]
because that’s money.
It’s a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant book.
And then there are books, I forgot the author’s name right now…one is called The Dip, one
is called The Purple Cow.
Seth Godin?
Oh!
Is he great or not?
Film Courage: He has a podcast, too?
Bill Duke: He’s brilliant.
The books are this thick.
But he tells you and shows you accomplishment.
What is accomplishment?
That’s four and then my favorite poet is T.S.
Eliot’s Four Quartets.
It’s the last thing I think before he passed and he talks about how every piece of poetry
but before that is meaningless until he just says right now he talks about what he has
learned in life and puts it in poem format.
Federico Fellini and Frank Capra are two of my favorite directors of all time.
8 AND A 1/2 every year I watch and sometimes look at the script of MR.
SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON and IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE.
The messages, the courage that he had at that time and when he was tortured by McCarthy
for saying the things he thinks he said and accusing him of being a communist but he went
on and did it anyway, he has encouraged my career and I can’t remember the name of
the director now but the script I could read over and over and over again because it’s
so brilliant and the film I could watch over a thousand times because it was so brilliant
came out about 9 or 10 years ago called RUN LOLA RUN [German thriller film written and
directed by Tom Tykwer].
Have you ever seen that one?
Film Courage: I’ve seen the trailer.
Bill Duke: You’ve got to watch it!
Film Courage: It’s on my list.
Bill Duke: He’s a genius.
When I say genius, he never got the credit he deserved but the film is told pictorially
and structurally through methodologies that no one else has ever seen that way.
It’s like…I’ll give you one example it’s a 24 hour thing.
This woman is called by her boyfriend supposed to deliver to the dealer doesn't have their
it set the money to the dealer because he lost the package on
the plane and named dealers coming in like three two or three hours and
he's got to be at a store and you have a pharmacy to meet the dealer
if the drug sees now the money he's gonna get hurt.
So his girlfriend does everything she can to make sure so the
film is divided in to all the attempts she makes and it starts her back
at the apartment over and over again and runs down the steps to different
places now as she runs down the steps she must down the steps she's running
doors open to a older lady's apartment and it moves over the older lady
shoulder into the TV and the TV shows are here opening down the steps when she gets
in the street she passes people and everybody she passes you see in five seconds a flashback
of their entire lives who they are and when she gets to the place where she tries
to get the money for him and it fails you go back to the appointment the phone
rings and he says I'm gonna get hurt if you don't get here she gets up and she once again
to try to get the money from someplace else.
It’s called RUN LOLA RUN.