Writer-Director Josh Boone’s filmography includes indie romance STUCK IN LOVE (’12), blockbuster adaptation THE FAULT IN OUR STARS (’14), and coming soon comic book adaptation THE NEW MUTANTS (’18). A cinephile to the core, Boone spoke to FilmStruck’s Marya E. Gates about his early love of film, how he discovered the Criterion Collection, and what films he thinks everyone should stream immediately.
FS: What was the movie that made you fall in love with movies?
Josh Boone: There’s so many. Could you name just one?
FS: No.
JB: Right? You’d have to name a couple I think.
FS: You can name a couple.
JB: My dad had a very large collection of movies on Beta that he taped off HBO when I was a kid in the 80s and he had a lot of those movies from the 70s, those Jack Nicholson movies like ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST and FIVE EASY PIECES and CARNAL KNOWLEDGE. He had all these old Jack Nicholson movies, so I watched those a lot. Jack Nicholson was always my favorite actor. Those 70s Jack Nicholson movies got me into Bogdanovich and THE LAST PICTURE SHOW and all the BBS stuff. When you learn about movies it’s like one thing leads to another. Back then I had to buy Video Watchdog books every year, or an Ebert guide to try to find stuff that I hadn’t seen. I remember seeing E.T. vividly as a kid. It was the 80s, so all those Spielberg movies and THE GOONIES. THE NEVERENDING STORY was one of my favorite movies of all time. That was a big deal when I was a kid. I saw that in theaters a couple of times. I watched movie after movie after movie and then I amassed over the years laserdiscs and DVDs. I didn’t go to film school, I really learned everything from DVD commentaries, behind the scenes documentaries, reading books about movies, and just watching movies. So I watched thousands and thousands of movies when I was a kid. I’d say I watch much less now because it takes so much time to make movies you have much less time to study them. You use them for reference and things like that and you watch them, but not with the same passion that you watched them with when you were young because you have to let that go a little bit to go do the job you have to do, and put the time in to do it. You build it all up and then you hold it inside you and then you go and make movies.
FS: That’s a great segue to the next question. What was the movie that made you want to make movies?
JB: I was obsessed with directors when I was young and I would keep file folders with every magazine clipping about David Lynch or Oliver Stone or Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino. I had all these files on them. It’s hard for me to think back to before I even wanted to make movies because my best friend (Knate Lee) and I who I wrote THE NEW MUTANTS with, we’ve known each other since we were little kids. Since we were little Muppet Babies or whatever. Our moms were best friends. We made movies on home video growing up all the time. Really as early as like 7 or 8 because my dad had one of those over the shoulder Beta cams and his parents had a Hi8 or something and we would shoot movies and edit in camera. We started making BATMAN rip-offs where my dad would play the Joker or a BACK TO THE FUTURE rip-off and that gradually led to us writing our own scripts and things like that. It was sort of an organic, long-term process so it’s hard to say the specific movie. But I can say the movie-going experience of my life when I was 12 years old my dad took me to see J.F.K. and that was maybe one of the great movie events I had at the theater when I was young. I remember gripping the armrests of my seat so tightly that there are probably still impressions of them there today. I think Oliver Stone’s run From SALVADOR to NIXON is one of the greatest runs a director has ever had. Those ten movies he made with Bob Richardson, all those movies were really big in our lives when we were young. We’d spend our lives reading comic books and watching movies and listening to music, and Oliver Stone movies were some of the first movies that made us want to go and read history books. Movies opened us up to the entire world because we were raised by very religious parents, like evangelical Christians, so like Paul Schrader – who I think wasn’t allowed to watch movies until he left for college – it was a bit of a forbidden fruit. We watched them all the time and they were an escape and a good way to see what the world was actually like beyond the crazy religious stuff.
FS: What was your first introduction to the Criterion Collection?
JB: I used to have a friend named Bill Kelley who worked at newspaper called the Virginian Pilot, which was the main newspaper in Virginia Beach. He was a big movie buff and he had a laserdisc player and we would all go over to his house on Sunday nights and he always had this massive collection of laserdiscs that we would pour over - religious, and old Hollywood classics, and even Spielberg movies. He had a couple of Criterions and he had a big glossy, like a brochure almost, like a 50-page Criterion catalogue that they would send out back in the day, before you could go online and just scroll through everything. It was full color and it was as big as a vinyl record. It had pictures from all the movies and all the extras. You just started to want to check all those boxes off and watch them all. So I got a laserdisc player for Christmas one year and I think the very first one I had was SE7EN, which was one like 8 discs or something. It was ridiculous. It weighed a ton. So I started collecting laserdisc and Criterion editions and listened to commentaries and all that. Oliver Stone did big pioneering laserdisc editions. I have one of PLATOON and THE DOORS. They cost like $150 dollars and they were so heavy. I loved all of that stuff.
FS: What was the first film you streamed on FilmStruck?
JB: I think I streamed some extras before I actually watched a movie. Then I watched some Kurosawa and Bergman that weren’t released on disc yet. I like that Criterion has all these titles in their catalogue and they can’t get them all out immediately so they’ll have them on the site so you can stream them even though it might be a couple of years before they come out on disc. There were so many things on their that haven’t been released. Kieślowski is one of my favorite directors and I love Annette Insdorf’s books about him, so she wrote this book called Double Lives, Second Chances, which I have read a couple of times. She just released a book about movie opening scenes (Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes), like what great movies do them well and what a great opening scene is. I love that video series [on the Cinematic Overtures: How to Read Opening Scenes theme] where she goes over the opening of BADLANDS and a bunch of other movies. She’s so eloquent and a great historian. She’s a hero a little bit.
Those Kieślowski movies certainly meant an awful lot to me. I always loved those because I am a big fan of Philip K. Dick and when I say Philip K. Dick, I do love BLADE RUNNER and MINORITY REPORT and TOTAL RECALL, but those really are no way representative of what reading one of his books is like. The only movie that really feels like Philip K. Dick is A SCANNER DARKLY, which is really like a word for word adaptation of the book. Some of those metaphysical ideas that were in Philip K. Dick I found in Kieślowski as well and I thought all of that stuff was really interesting. I love Tarkovsky movies, as long and boring as some of my friends might think they are, they blow your mind and make you think of things you hadn’t thought about before. I love things that are imaginative. Like LA JETÉE, I love watching that and it’s inspiration on 12 MONKEYS.
FS: If the world were about to end what movies on FilmStruck would you recommend everyone stream before we all died?
JB: That is one of the scariest movies ever. Those little kids beating that lady to death. It’s pretty awful. I’d put that up if you really want to barf one night. This will do it for you. I love all those music docs like DONT LOOK BACK. I love Robert Altman. The fucking THE CONFORMIST for sure. I love love love [Jean-Luc] Godard’s stuff with Anna Karina. I love MASCULIN FÉMININ, even though she’s not in that, I love PIERROT LE FOU. I love all the Kurosawa stuff. THRONE OF BLOOD especially I love. The movie I would recommend the most right now because it’s not on Blu-ray is Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 1997 CURE. It’s one of the scariest, best horror movies ever made. I’m so glad it’s on here because I can’t watch it anywhere else. I’m a huge Terry Gilliam fan. TIME BANDITS is one of my favorite movies from back when I was a kid. I love IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, THE GRADUATE. All this stuff. It’s all just such great stuff.
FS: Have you found anything while you’re browsing FilmStruck that you’d never heard of but just had to watch it?
JB: I go into the directors and I look through different filmmakers and I look through all of the ones that have introductions. Like, I will go through all of the ones that Guillermo Del Toro did an introduction for. I like when people come and talk about their favorite movies. I go through all the extras, all the additional things that you guys do that are exclusive and add context. When you guys had all those [Mario] Bava movies up, we just let those play. It’s good in the background. You don’t have to pay super close attention, but it’s like those movies look so amazing.
Shot by cinematographer Peter Deming (long-time David Lynch collaborator), and co-written by Knate Lee, director Josh Boone’s latest film THE NEW MUTANTS hits theaters on April 13.
Just in case you missed it, or haven’t had a chance to listen yet, I HIGHLY recommend listening to Josh Boone on Kevin Smith’s Hollywood Babble On podcast. He talks his upbringing, his movies and his love of Stephen King. He also discusses his plans for The Stand.
All I know is, listening to this, I am STOKED for the films. I had reservations about it, but Boone gets it. I feel like him being a SK super fan means everything. He’s going to make the book and he’s going to make it about the story and the characters.
You can listen at the link posted, or download from iTunes (it’s the 11/17/14 bonus episode).
As his biographer Patrick McGilligan noted, during the 1940s Alfred Hitchcock seldom succeeded in pulling together a dream cast for any of his films, but there was one “glorious exception.” His 1946 spy thriller Notorious turned out to be a box office hit, surely making previously disinterested David O. Selznick regret his decision of selling the film to RKO. Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains built a believable, intense love triangle, making the film a finely crafted romantic, personal story in the midst of an espionage operation, where the hidden uranium functioned only as a catalyst of Hitchock’s character development. But impressive cast, beautiful acting and all that Hitchcock-monitored-by-the-FBI trivia aside, the film became ‘notorious’ primarily for offering the audience one of the most famous shots in cinematic history. Starting all the way up from the balcony, Hitchcock begins approaching Ingrid Bergman’s character, standing in the middle of a great hall, finally coming down to the tight close-up of a key gripped in her hand. This magnificent zoom-in from a high crane shot to an extreme close-up of a significant plot detail in Bergman’s hand is one of the reason critics call Notorious the turning point of Hitchcock’s career, marking his stylistic maturity.
As much as we admire the shot, we mustn’t forget that one fantastic detail such as this would hardly be as celebrated as it is had it not been for Ben Hecht‘s script. An old collaborator of Hitchcock’s, Hecht worked on screenplays for so many films now perceived as classics that his nickname, ‘The Shakespeare of Hollywood,’ hardly seems a pretentious hyperbole. Thanks to all this, Notorious is now considered one of Hitchcock’s finest. And rightfully so.
