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I just started my professorial duty in Frankfurt on Monday
night, actually.
I'm the film class professor.
It's very serious.
And one of the things I said to one of the students was
that I was a very diligent student, and I did my life
drawing class.
And I did my stained glass window class.
I did my mural painting class.
The only class that I really got deliberately ill enough
not to be able to attend was the video class.
I always hated it.
I knew what I liked, and what I liked was film.
And there was something very primal for me, in that I don't
really like information to be shot straight into my eye.
I always preferred the idea that you are getting it in
some kind of a third-hand way.
You have the celluloid.
A light passes through.
It hits the screen.
And then your eye gets it.
And there's something softer, even if you're watching a very
hard series of images, with difficult ideas.
I think there's a softer landing.
It's very telling that technocrats and technicians
have been pushing video to be as close to film as possible.
Therefore, film is still on that pedestal.
When I started looking at films in a certain way, and
doing almost nothing to them except re-presenting the way
that they would be seen, or could be seen, that definitely
is coming from the kind of intellectual rigor that I had
through my studies in London.
But I think the choices of the films that I worked on were
probably coming from this much more
autobiographical exercise.
Let's take, for example, Hitchcock's "Psycho" and "Taxi
Driver," for instance.
I didn't see "Psycho," I think, until I was about 21.
And I didn't see "Taxi Driver" until I was about 26 or 27.
I mean, there was a lot to do with the old experience of
cinema, as well.
And the fact that there was something happening, I think,
in the 1980s, in Britain at least, that cinema was going
down, and TV and VCR was coming up.
And my experience of film was definitely much more in the
domestic situation, rather than the communal cinematic,
or cathedral, of cinema, which I like
to think about sometimes.
And then when I got into it, and hit the French New Wave--
and one of the most important books, which I think is one of
the best books on cinema ever, is the interviews between
Hitchcock and Truffaut.
And that was kind of a turning point, I think, for me, when I
realized that there were different types of cinema.
They could be deconstructed, and you could openly seduce
people at the same time as being slightly intellectual.
One of my students, actually, in Frankfurt, said to me, when
was the last time you went to the cinema?
I had to kind of lie and say, I never go to the cinema for
moral reasons.
But the last time I was in the cinema was to see my work.
Last time I was in the cinema before that
was to see my work.
The last time I was in the cinema before that
was to see my work.
And that just sounds like such a load of wank.
To a student, sometimes it's better not to tell the truth.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
When I started to work with the material, and I mean when
the material will be a videotape, and like an
innocent person, I did take a videotape and held it up-- and
there's nothing to see.
And that's magical, as well.
It appears to be nothing, but it contains all this
information of a different--
I suppose it's the early idea of the avatar, in a way, that
the cinema screen has all these characters behind.
And I think with "24 Hour Psycho," when I installed that
in Glasgow for the first time in 1993, I wanted to put the
screen in the middle of the space, so when you went behind
it, you just saw the same thing from the other side, but
from the other side.
So that's when I started to get interested
in the mirror image.
I went from there into hospital archives, and started
to dig around and for images which looked magical, because
they were shot by cinematographers, even though
they were done, apparently, for medical purposes.
It became obvious that I was going to have to get behind
the camera one day, rather than stand in
front of the mirror.
I had to take another step back and be behind the camera,
and behind the lens, also in front of a mirror.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
I knew I had to start making films.
And actually, the first film that I made was called
"Feature Film." Maybe I wasn't confident enough to think that
I would make anything other than that, so I had this kind
of very teenage, vain idea that in my life I always
wanted to write a short novel, make a record, and make a
feature film.
So at least I got the feature film done.
And having done that, which was a study of a conductor
with an orchestra--
the orchestra are never seen, so how would you know that he
would be a conductor?
And the orchestra are playing the score to Hitchcock's
"Vertigo."
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And when we showed that, some people who saw it had asked me
questions like, how many little images did you slip in
from "Vertigo?" Because they really think that they saw
James Stewart or Kim Novak in my film.
And it never happened.
But cinematic experience and the music obviously was
powerful enough that images were coming from inside of
their head, and they were projecting their
images onto my film.
And I thought that that's an incredibly sophisticated and
perverse thing to happen.
After making "Feature Film," and I was quite confident by
that time then about working in the industry.
So the premise for "Zidane" was what if we make a feature
film which is a portrait, and why not make it around a
football player?
And of course when we went to see Zidane it became three
questions--
what if, why not, and Zidane said, why me?
And we said to him, no one really knows what
aftershave you wear.
We don't know if you go out to nightclubs.
You exist from the first kick of the ball
until the final whistle.
And that's what's incredibly special about you as a player.
He represents something which is exclusively
him, completely chimeric.
So he becomes everyone else.
The day before the match, that's when our
crew started to arrive.
And you can imagine 17 or 18 cameras, each camera having an
operator, a focus puller, a loader, and a runner.
I think the crew was about 150 or something like that.
The pressure was on.
And still the producers were saying to us, you have to make
a storyboard.
And we said, we can't.
It's a live event.
And they said, but you have to be able to say something to
the operators about what it is that you want.
So Philippe and I had a little chat.
The collection of portraits in the Prado is probably one of
the best in the world.
So we took our camera guys there on the
morning of the game.
And they opened up the doors to the Prado, and we walked in
through the Goya entrance.
And you have this vast corridor of portrait after
portrait after portrait.
And we said to the film guys, to the operators, this is our
storyboard.
Look down the corridor, and imagine that every painting is
a film still.
And as we're walking past, please look carefully at every
still that you're seeing.
Now, we're shooting at 24 frames a second, but we want
all of the information that you're seeing from this Goya,
which probably took about a year to paint--
we want a year's worth in everything.
So we obviously set the bar pretty high.
And it was astonishing.
These guys who shoot, who look at people, and look at events
as their daily bread, had never seen
anything quite like that.
One of the most beautiful memories that I have is
standing in front of these two paintings of the Duchess of
Alba, I think it is, both by Goya, same
woman lying on a chaise.
One she has her clothes on.
One she is not wearing clothes.
But the angle of observation is slightly different.
And Philippe and I were saying, we don't really know
how to explain what's going on here, but look at the dynamic
between the two pictures.
It's a phenomenon.
So we got the most expensive storyboard in the history of
film done, because we used the Prado.
I don't think that anybody that I really respect thinks
of themselves in any world.
The best chefs I know are always involved
in something else.
The best filmmakers are always involved in something else.
The best singers are always doing something else.
I think you can be a hermetic, but within your little hermit
cave or whatever, I think it's important that you have
something else happening somewhere else in the world.
One of the best comments that a teacher ever made to her
class in Glasgow was, you're here for four years--
don't feel that you have to leave and be an artist.
Just enjoy this four years that you have here, because
you'll never have this amount of freedom again.
And as a little lotus eater that I am, I wanted to
perpetuate that four years for as long as possible.
So that's why I don't really have a huge engagement with
what's perceived to be the art market, or the art world, or
the film world, or anything else.
People will always put you in a pigeonhole.
Why would you fly in on your own?