Original subtitles

My favorite road movies are Kings of the Road and Alice in the City. Obviously,

Paper Moon and Bonnie and Clyde. Vanishing Point, Thelma and Louise.

Grapes of Wrath and Easy Rider is a brilliant road movie.

All the ones I can think of are the ones I've done.

I've seen Five Easy Pieces many, many times.

Dino Ricci's Il Serpasso. Straight Story, I love that.

I don't have any one favorite.

I kind of enjoy all of them, anything that has to do with it.

cars going fast and round corners and raising hell with the cops and things

like that. I kind of enjoy that.

Explode into space

Taking a drive crossing this country of 3,000 miles with such different terrain

is extraordinary.

It seems to be forever.

I think there's something about America, that idea of mobility, being there from

the beginning, starting with the pilgrims coming here from England. It's

connected with this.

romanticism about the american landscape that is such a part of our our national

identity i was always fascinated by this country the size

in europe you know you go 100 miles you're in a different country different

language what i saw did blow my mind i must say it was everything i

was hoping it was and so much more i meant to

I never actually believed that it exists.

I really love it more than any other landscape in the world because it is so

resistant and so ancient and wise and full of strange beauty.

You know what I love about this country, and I think Gertrude Stein said it, is

that there's more empty space where there are no people than places where

there are people.

I'm astounded at the level of emptiness out there.

There's something very freeing about being out in the middle of nowhere and

nobody fucking knows where you are. I aspire to having landscape reflect,

you know, exterior landscape reflect interior landscape, and you see

that a lot in westerns.

When people came to this country, there were no roads, so you could say that the

history of this country was about the road in a way.

There was that amazing time for maybe 100, 150 years when the road was open

-ended. When it wasn't going from A to B, it was just going.

We're about ready to fall out of that saddle.

Why don't we rest up for a little?

I'm not that tired.

I think without the westerns, we would never have... I mean, I think road

movies are just extensions of westerns.

They fulfill the same fantasy element that Westerns did for sure.

Of course there were no cars, but horses and carriages probably qualify.

The real tradition of roads in this country is trails.

You know, there were trails everywhere.

The first round trip on air-filled tires was made in 1918 by trucks following

wagon roads and the old Santa Fe Trail.

The natural American inclination to wanderlust had found the perfect outlet.

It's a country that kept moving west and so the culture is just one of movement.

Keep going, keep going, you know, we'll find paradise someday.

The dust storms never blow.

I'm going where them dust storms never blow.

I'm going where them dust storms never blow, blow, blow. And I ain't going to

be treated this way.

One of the reasons that people go on the road is because of economic pressures.

And so that makes the Depression a perfect setting for the road movie.

You've been looking for a job for over two months now.

What good would it do for me to look for one?

Even my father can't get work.

Maybe it would be better in some other place.

Any place would be better than this dumb town.

Us three kids have been traveling around the country looking for work.

You don't think we like the road, do you?

In my memory, a great road picture was Grapes of Wrath, because I was born in

the Dust Bowl during that period just after that in 1936 in Kansas, and the

whole country had blown away.

So I remember going to school, and I was like five years old with a gas mask, you

know, part of the time, because I couldn't even see the sun. It was like a

little, you know, I'd see a little orange ball every once in a while. I

used to tell people the first light I saw was in a movie theater, you know, in

a projector.

What's your name?

Jode.

Tom Joad.

Grapes of Wrath is probably the greatest, certainly the darkest road

movie I can think of. One of the darkest movies made in the studio system.

A hundred folks and no place to live but on the road.

The Rances, the Peterses, the Perrys, the Jogses.

One right after the other, they got thrown out.

Half the folks, you and me know.

It's thrown right down into the road.

At the core of the road movie is a impulse of cultural critique.

I'm going out on the road to find out what it's like to be poor and needy, and

then I'm going to make a picture about it. If you'll permit me to say so, sir,

the subject is not an interesting one.

The poor know all about poverty, and only the morbid rich would find the

topic glamorous.

I love Sullivan's Travel. I think Sullivan's Travel is brilliant.

I want to make O Brother Where Art Thou, and I'll tell you what I'm going to do

first.

I'm going down to the wardrobe and get some old clothes, some old shoes.

Huh? And I'm going to start out with 10 cents in my pocket. What? I don't know

where I'm going, but I'm not coming back till I know what trouble is. What?

The film is about a movie director who, during the Depression, wants to make the

social statement. So it's a parody of a lot of the social conscience films from

the 30s. How do you feel about the labor situation?

You know, another great road movie that had a great impact on me is It Happened

One Night.

I'll stop a car and I won't use my thumb.

What are you going to do?

It's a system on my own.

It Happened One Night is just about a perfect screwball comedy, and it's a

road movie.

You've got a runaway heiress.

She can't take care of herself.

Donut. Thanks.

It was very reassuring to the audience who were plunking down their ten cents

to see that this rich girl wasn't happy. I've always been told what to do and how

to do it and when and with whom.

Furthermore, she didn't even know how to dunk her donut.

Say, where'd you learn to dunk? In finishing school?

It was a way of saying in the Depression, you may be poor, but the

rich aren't really any better off than you are.

There is some comments on the Depression, but they're kept at a

minimum, and the romantic part is what counts.

It's arguably Capra's most perfect picture.

Victory and the lives of our own men in uniform depend upon you.

Everything was upbeat in the war. People were together, focused to do this job.

And then suddenly we did it, and now what?

We're just going to make money and spend money and buy things and build things.

I'm a rolling stone, all alone and lost. People felt

something was wrong.

You can't overstate the influence of film noir on the road movie. Keep

driving. Going out on the road is going out into something that is unfamiliar

and uncertain and can be very dangerous.

The only way I could cross country was to thumb rides.

Or even after hocking everything, I only had enough money to eat.

Money.

You know what that is.

It's the stuff you never have enough of.

Little green things with George Washington's picture that men slave for.

commit crimes for, die for.

Detour is one of my favorite movie's period.

It has that existential spirit of being on the road more than any of the films

of that period.

You know, Emily Post ought to write a book of rules for guys thumbing rides.

Because as it is now, you never know what's right and what's wrong.

It is so... hopeless.

Yes.

Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good

reason at all.

You know what we're gonna do when we get to Mexico?

Buy ourselves a nice ranch and settle down.

In most woke movies, the idea of family is like a dream.

And these restless people, they have this vision.

or that they desire to be grounded somewhere but then again they can't

decide where it is that they belong the idea to make a decision

to marry and have children they just can't make the decision because the

temptation of going on is just too big look i don't want to look in that mirror

and see nothing but a stick-up man staring back at me

You better kiss me goodbye, Bart.

In my hometown, nobody was talking about love is a many-splendored thing. People

liked gun crazy because it was about guns, and it was about crazy, two things

that we understood.

I'll kill you.

In the 50s, we're experiencing a disillusionment, a kind of post-war

letdown. It comes out with the new need to make road pictures that appeal to the

idea of escape.

It gets really interesting with the advent of, like, suburbia, Americans

being able to move around a lot.

One of our modern points of pride or shame is the fact that you can go

through a day, eat, take in a movie, do your laundry, shop, go to the library

and bank, all without once having to leave your car.

Now the American prosperity is starting, the baby boom is starting, and people...

wanted to explore the country a tall lanky fellow in a gallon hat

stopped his car on the wrong side of the road and came over to us he looked like

a sheriff boy's going to get somewhere or just going we didn't understand his

question and it was a damn good question in an odd way the first road movie is a

book and it is on the road which really informed an enormous number

of filmmakers as a book.

These two guys, Sal and Dean, just keep driving back and forth across the

country, and they keep having all these adventures.

A magnificent car made the wind roar.

It made the plains unfold like a roll of paper. It cast hot tar from itself for

deference. It made me want to have a Hudson Hornet.

That was the greatest stock car of its time.

It looked like a big, deadly insect, but it goes very fast. They had a great

engine.

There was a whole feeling that you can't just accept everything. You have to get

in there and do things. You have to look for who you are. You have to fight for

who you are.

The idea of the road, from Kerouac's point of view, quite radically different

from people who were traveling those trails to get somewhere.

They had a purpose. They had an objective.

Whereas the Kerouac thing suddenly is nobody knows what to do, so let's just

hit the road.

It's a lostness, you know.

Which is just the way the culture went, I think.

I had been the art director of Escar Magazine.

David Newman was one of the junior editors.

It was our job to look for what was coming up next.

And we were always looking at life for what was going to happen, for signs of

change.

And we saw a sign of change in The New Wave.

I was like a fan of what was being done in Europe.

With Truffaut, mostly.

I mean, I liked Godard's ideas. I wasn't so fond of his movies, except for

Breathless.

It's Hollywood. A lot of things were done on sets or were done in studios.

And I loved the idea of being able to go out in the street and shoot.

The whole world's a soundstage. Those kind of ideas were so, so important to

me. American movies had become very retro, had become stagnant. It was just

a moment that everything...

had to change.

Bonnie and Clyde I consider to be really the foundation or the beginning of the

road movie proper.

It's a lot of this kind of new wave style jump cut editing.

They wanted to take it out into the spaces where people like Bonnie and

Clyde had actually done what they did.

C.W. Moss.

Well, I'm Miss Bonnie Parker, and this here's Mr. Clyde Barrow.

We rob bank.

I'll be all right.

Bonnie and Clyde and C.W. and Buck and Blanche all form an ad

hoc family, and their home is this car.

Law enforcement officers throughout the Southwest are frankly amazed at the way

in which the will of the West Bandit Clyde Barrow...

and his yellow-haired companion, Bonnie Parker, continued to elude their would

-be captors. We didn't want to see them as sociopaths. We didn't want to see

them as psychopaths. We wanted them to be very much like all of us. So you are

identified with Bonnie and Clark, and you cannot distance yourself

emotionally. I think if they were just outlaws, they wouldn't have entered it.

But the idea that they were separate from society.

They couldn't have fit in normal society.

They wouldn't have fit anywhere.

Where are you going when you leave here?

I mean, do you just ride around or do you go on some sort of a picnic or

something?

A picnic? Man, you are too square.

I have to straighten you out.

Now, listen, you don't go any one special place. That's cornball style.

You just go.

What

are

you leaving?

Suburbia.

What are you leaving? A 9-to-5 job.

What are you leaving? The family.

The whole thing of that is a country or is a nation resides in the...

places where people live.

And if you say, so long, Charlie.

I'm not accepting this.

Bye-bye.

Then you really are turning your back.

Showtime. No crowds to bark. Just go get it. The second part of the 60s. Now,

these drive-in theaters, they ate up the B movies, you know, the exploitation

films. And that's how it was born, you know, all these accent film, horror

movies. and amongst other stuff, the Pike movies.

Sex, violence, popcorn.

I mean, these movies were really, really very cheaply made.

Jack did Hell's Angels on Wheels.

That was probably the best one.

And then Peter had the biggest success with The Wild Angels, a big hit. In the

Angel Gang, if you're one man's woman... You're his old lady.

If you're a mama, you're every man's woman.

There's no doubt that Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper got together and said they

wanted to do something like the Wild Angels, but different.

I pulled into Nazareth, was feeling about half past dead.

I just need some place where I can lay my head.

Can you tell me where a man might find a band? A man went looking for America and

couldn't find it anywhere?

I don't know what it means.

That was some publicist's idea of what the movie was about.

The tagline's a little bit hyperbolic for Easy Rider. They couldn't find it

anywhere. I don't think so. I think they find it. I think that when they're

sitting around the campfire smoking on a joint and talking about freedom, that's

America. You know, and these guys across a wide cultural divide connect.

That's America.

What the hell's wrong with freedom, man? That's what it's all about.

Oh, yeah, that's right. That's what it's all about, all right.

Of course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free, because then they're

going to get real busy killing and maiming to prove to you that they are.

Each decade's road movies takes on whatever is a main issue of its time.

Easy Rider.

It put the drugs really overtly on the screen.

It put the politics overtly on the screen.

I made it at a time that the whole country was like in the middle of a

riot.

I mean, the universities were burning down. There was a war, an unpopular war

going on.

So there was a lot of different reaction.

When I showed it in Los Angeles, they stood up and screamed, kill the pigs,

screaming, kill the pigs, okay?

All right.

I see it in New Orleans, and they cheer.

when we're shot.

Okay.

Now, I went, oh, wait a second.

Maybe things aren't gonna change as much as I think.

This used to be a hell of a good country.

A journey is a person in itself.

No two are alike.

And all plans, safeguards, policing and coercion are fruitless.

We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip.

A trip takes us.

Just go?

He pushes the toe of his boot across the burned black rubber skid mark, follows

the crazy swerve of tires with his eyes, sour smell of rubber, sweet smell of

sand sweltering.

Now a lizard moves, makes a fragile fish-like... Could it be that Americans

are a restless people?

A mobile people?

never satisfied with where they are as a matter of selection.

Hell, what do I got to stay around here for?

The pioneers, the immigrants who peopled the continent, were the restless ones in

Europe.

The steady-rooted ones stayed home and are still there.

Where to?

But every one of us...

are descended from the restless ones, the wayward ones who are not content to

stay at home.

Wouldn't it be unusual if we had not inherited this tendency?

Sort of why I got involved with films, because it was really an obsession with

the road.

So then I saw these moving images, which, you know, related to my own

personal restlessness and, you know, obsession with keeping moving.

In a car, out on the road, it's one of the places where you're actually truly

free and without any kind of restrictions or boundaries, with the

possible exception of, you know, a speed limit or how fast your car will go.

Well, I drove a rocket car 620 miles an hour. Is that fast enough for you?

Thunderous send-off to Hal Needham.

Americans have a love for speed.

Everybody has, at one time or another, tested it. See how long, you know, can

I get by the cops? Can I get there in a certain length of time and everything?

It's just natural.

The whole idea of speed as it relates to American culture is sort of a crucial

idea. Look at the acceleration that we're going in now.

Everything is going faster and faster and faster.

Cars are bigger and burn up more gas.

So you feel that the faster you go, that really, inevitably, you're headed for an

implosion. You know, you're headed for, at the very least, chaos or a brick

wall.

This radio station was named Kowalski in honor of the last American hero to whom

speed means freedom of the soul.

I saw it as an opportunity to shoot speed, or to learn how to shoot speed,

or to reach into the molecule of speed.

In Vanishing Point, the guy's sort of furiously driving for some reason that

has nothing to do with anything. I mean, there's just some arbitrary...

Bet that he could do it and the movies not really about that

He's

an outlaw, but they don't really know why so it's really about this kind of

manic nihilistic driving That's what we all wish we could do. We wish we could

just keep going and going going and not have to come back to work

The vanishing point for me was, you know, I saw that when I was 16 or 17 in

that rebellious stage, and for this guy to sort of just, you know, blow off

authority and just dictate for himself what his life was going to be as

represented by this white Dodge Challenger and his need to drive fast, I

mean, it's thrilling.

On one hand, American cinema does celebrate the road as freedom, you know,

and that notion's fueled by advertising.

Ride Ford's new wave with Mustang.

But I think they also get the alienation, you know, and the

aimlessness and the roads that lead to nowhere.

I, Richard Nixon, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the... I shall

resign the presidency... As daylight came, Saigon streets were empty. All

Americans are to be evacuated immediately.

In the 70s, everything was changing in American society.

and cinema was reflecting this as a mirror.

In Five Easy Pieces, Jack Nicholson's character doesn't really know where he's

going or what he's doing, and he's kind of wandering.

I love it.

Five Easy Pieces, that's like an insanely great American road movie.

What the hell are they doing?

And just picking people up along the road like that, you know, that now

they're in your car.

Hey,

what the hell's going on?

Rotate, Mac!

He picks up these two women who are, you know, sort of leftover hippies.

Where are you going?

Alaska.

Alaska? What, are you on vacation?

She wants to live there, because it's cleaner.

Cleaner? Cleaner than what?

It's very cynical, and we're supposed to be very cynical about them because

they're hippies, and that didn't work. Truck drivers are the only ones that

know the best places to stop on the road. Salesmen and cops are the ones.

If you'd have a waitress, honey, you'd know that.

No substitutions.

Okay, I'll make it as easy for you as I can.

I'd like an omelet, plain, and a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast.

No mayonnaise, no butter, no lettuce, and a cup of coffee.

And number two, chicken salad sandwich.

Hold the butter, the lettuce, the mayonnaise, and a cup of coffee.

Anything else?

Yeah, now all you have to do is hold the chicken, bring me the toast, give me a

check for the chicken salad sandwich, and you haven't broken any rules.

You want me to hold the chicken, huh?

I want you to hold it between your knees.

I think that that character finds himself somehow without any self-esteem

and without any real identity.

He refuses to identify with his home, refuses to really follow through on his

education and his musical training.

The most glorious definition,

I think, of being on the road is not wanting to arrive.

And the more you do it, the less you want to get anywhere.

He was a silent small boy.

After a week, it could stand it no longer.

He said, if you'll take me with you, why, I'll do anything.

Unfortunately for me, I knew his longing.

He had the dream I've had all my life.

And there is no cure.

Here we are on the road.

Yeah, that's where we are, all right.

I have a lot of filmmakers who come up to me and say that Julian Blacktop was

the reason they decided to make movies.

Maybe it's just this kind of nostalgia for a kind of freedom that's eroding

more and more all the time.

What I recall about Tulane Blacktop is that there really wasn't much action. It

was about an aimlessness.

Where to?

You name it.

I feel like I understand that girl just getting in the guy's car.

She didn't even know that the car belonged to these two guys. She just got

in.

She knew it was going to be going on the road, and she got in with her shit.

It's really bumpy back here. I totally understand that.

Would I sleep with both of them?

Absolutely. On the road back then. I mean, it's just the way that things

were.

I went out to the San Fernando Valley when I was in L.A. and just hung out

with all these car freaks, you know?

And it was like a new world to me. I was from New York. I didn't really know

about cars.

It was like learning a language.

So I just thought it was amazing.

It was like an art form.

I knew you were a car nut.

I can spot the type.

But all that speed is going to run over you one of these days.

You can't be a nomad forever.

The road is a way to get away from home, but as you go further and further on the

road and more and more towards the edge of the wedge, so to speak, the pull of

home becomes more...

Present because you're you get lost We'll build a house

Yeah, we'll build a house

Because if I'm not grounded pretty soon

I'm gonna go into orbit

Strange feelings from the orange sunlight

on the sandy dry country so far from home

Just the sort of unexplained sadness that comes from each afternoon.

When the new day is gone forever, and there's nothing ahead but increasing

darkness.

At this moment, I didn't feel shame or fear. It just kind of blocked.

Like when you're sitting there and all the water's run out of the bathtub.

Badlands was amazing. You know, that was a great road film.

You have to go.

Pretty far to beat that one as far as a road movie goes. Of course, it's a

little bit of a horror show, too.

Little did I realize that what began in the alleys and backways of this quiet

town would end in the badlands of Montana.

It's really one of the best examples of this 1970s road movie mood.

Kit took the bottle and spun it around.

leaving to fate which direction we should take.

The way that Malick conceives this outlaw couple in terms of this sense of

alienation, this sense of disenchantment.

We lived in utter loneliness, neither here nor there.

Kit said that solitude was a better word because it meant more exactly what I

wanted to say.

I've got to tell you something about me.

Look, it means something, but you're lying. You know what I mean?

Yeah? I don't trust anybody.

I don't love anybody.

The first character, you know, Gene Hackman and Pacino, you know, they're

hobos on the road.

It's an exciting movie.

Eat, kid, alone!

You bell-eckin' right-nest-ass!

Pacino was very young. He was frightened.

His wife tells him he's gonna have a baby.

Just couldn't handle it.

He just wanted out.

The other one was a rough, tough guy who just got into trouble all the time.

Max, who doesn't want to talk to anybody, finally starts talking to this

guy because he gave him his last match. He befriended him.

They couldn't talk to their mothers or fathers or priests or something. They

found each other they could talk to.

You're sweating all over the damn place.

Come here.

and reformed and formed families and friendships according to what their

circumstances were. And our movies really reflect that.

Come on, Eddie, better get your things together. This nice man's going to take

you to your aunt.

How come you're taking me?

Huh? How come you're taking me?

Because I'm going that way, honey.

I loved that movie so much, you know, and the two of them driving for those

huge, vast expanses in that.

car you were just falling in love with them the whole time the movement in a

road movie is not simply a geographic movement it's often an interior movement

within the characters you're my pa of course i ain't your pa i'll get you

some relish when you see in paper moon the deepening and the love story between

man and a child Evolve as they move and continue to move it seems to me to have

that sense of myth I love it when you can see forever and roads that are like

that Which is that's the kind of shot we always tried to get in flirting with

disaster And I actually put that on my wedding invitation because I saw that as

a metaphor for the unknown of a marriage You don't know is it gonna end in

catastrophe or beauty or love or you know, who knows what's gonna happen

ahead of you?

Sugarland Express is interesting for how it kind of anticipates the next wave.

I think that a lot of times the reason people went on the road was because

their order and their traditional values had been threatened.

I don't want my baby back.

Are you going to help me or not?

In Sugarland Express, you have character...

trying to fight for her child.

Just get your goddamn hands in the air.

Know where we are, kidnappers? I don't care. We're on the road, ain't we? I

really don't know what you're yelling at.

Well, what are you doing with our man in there?

He's just taking us to Sugar Land to get my boy Langston. What you have is sort

of the outlaw couple with a twist. They sort of befriend the policeman, this

representative of law and order.

social convention domesticity and all those things he becomes

their third buddy and actually

ends up displacing the male outlaw who gets killed near the end and it's

suggested that the law man is now going to fill his shoes sugarland express

looks forward as of course it has to in many ways being directed by steven

spielberg to the blockbuster 80s and the whole reagan era it's morning again in

america please vote and please vote republicans

charlie's

a mild-mannered executive who's never been far from home

Now Lulu's taking him all the way. There were a slew of movies about yuppies on

the road.

I mean, look straight, you know, but right down in here, that's where it

counts.

My wife and I have dropped out of society.

We're going to roam across the country and find ourselves, just like they did

in Easy Rider.

Easy what?

Easy Rider, the film.

Oh, I didn't see that film.

Great movie. You've got to see it. It's historic.

You tire me, Ray. I know.

We're going to drive to Los Angeles. We're going to drive to L.A.

Okay? Come on, Ray.

Ray?

You have the Tom Cruise character who's living in the fast lane and living for

the fast buck.

His older brother can offer insights that are a moral corrective to the

wayward immorality of yuppiedom and Reaganomics.

The idea you were in a car, stuck with someone, and you can't truly communicate

with that individual because you are a hustler.

So you use words to manipulate people, and suddenly you are now faced with

someone that you can't manipulate.

You hear me. I know you hear me. You'll fool me with this shit for a second.

You're just too tight. Ray, did you fucking hear what I said?

Shut up!

There's a magic to the road in how it'll affect characters. So a lot of things

happened, because there was a lot of improvisational stuff that started in

the car.

We are not going to Cincinnati, and that's fine.

That's actually how the big argument about underwear happened.

What difference does it make? What difference does it make? Where do you

buy underwear?

Rain Man is a significant road movie.

but often hollywood road movies they're not about anything other than

pyrotechnics spectacle slapstick laugh

this is

smokey and the bandit the story about a lazy weekend in alabama texas

mississippi arkansas smoky that was supposed to go

from the land of georgia to

Texarkana and back.

But we shot the whole thing within 30 miles of downtown Atlanta, Georgia.

A tree's a tree's a rock's a rock.

It really doesn't matter to me what's in the background.

I'm not doing Fiddler on the Roof or Gone with the Wind or anything like

that. You know, I got a car going across the screen 90 miles an hour. What are

you going to do, look at the background?

What the hell is this, a drive-in movie?

I shot that film for $4.3 million.

To date, it's grossed over $300 million.

Now, that's profit.

There's something else of yours that I want.

Oh, really? What's that?

Your ass!

If you look at those films, they're not about the road that much. They take

place on the road, but it's a pretext for gags, gimmicks, mishaps.

Phoebe Herman loves this bike more than anything. It gets stolen, and he has to

go find it.

All these different things I had been thinking about trying to incorporate

into something could easily happen in a road picture because it was very easy to

go, oh, bikers, cowboys, just lists of different people he would meet

along the way.

While Hollywood is doing these kooky comedies, Wim Wenders takes up the road

movie helm.

His films, like a lot of the early 70s American road movies, they're primarily

about being on the road.

I was fascinated by the roads in Europe, any roads, anything to drive on.

and of course shooting in america was the perfection of my ideas of my idea of

shooting on the road

walker

evans he's the first photographer who i really understood and i made

kings of the road sort of with his photographs in mind

I mean, all the aesthetics, all the corrugated iron that is so constantly

fascinating, all those empty landscapes.

Robbie, my cameraman, and I had a book of Walker Evans with us, and a lot of

our framing came straight out of that book.

Sam Shepard and I were kind of drunk down in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

I told him I'd love to do just one...

that had some intelligence and there was poetry in it and substance and all of

that.

So I got back to L.A. and he called me and said, you want to play the lead in

my new movie, Paris, Texas?

The origin of Paris, Texas is my friendship with Sam Shepard.

We were in San Francisco at the time.

Spent most of the time in the back room of Tosca's telling each other stories

and out of all these stories emerged the character of Travis so the man who

appeared out of nowhere was Looking for his family that he had lost and that was

the beginning of the script Scene one desert

landscape exterior day

A fissured, empty, almost lunar landscape seen from bird's eye view.

The camera hovers over it.

In the distance, a lone man appears.

He is crossing this desert.

A hawk lands on a boulder.

The man stops, looks at the bird, and

continues down the bleak, hot plains that lie before him.

I felt I had a very good relationship to the landscape and I had traveled

extensively for about three months.

So I was very familiar with the colors and with the light.

The great thing about working with Vim is that we work from scratch. We just

start scene by scene by scene. We don't have this big, long, huge idea of where

it's going or how it wants to end up or anything like that.

Would always in the morning appear on the set and look at the place and the

landscape and only then Start thinking how to shoot it

It

went

really well for half the shoot and then I run out of script

I had no idea where we would find her or what would happen.

I had no idea how that story could possibly end.

I had to interrupt the shoot. Everybody was sent home.

After a week, I was able to send Sam sort of a rough outline of the way I

could possibly envision the second half.

When you do a road movie, you have to be completely open to the unexpected, and

you can't work with a very tight, dramatic structure.

It's a little bit like playing jazz.

By the time Paris, Texas comes out, you've got the birth of the New York

independent film movement. All those guys are very much, I think, indebted to

vendors, and a lot of those guys...

our road movie directors paris texas was a really uh really big one for me which

is a pretty great road movie that was pretty influential as a film

on say like my own private idaho this road

will never end it probably

goes all

around the world.

Cold spring wind whistling through that old heap around our shivering, sick,

sweating bodies.

And the cold you always come down with when the junk runs out of you.

on through the peeled landscape, dead armadillos in the road.

I was once a shameless full-time dope fiend.

Yeah, me, Bob, this sweet mother's son.

Me and my crew robbed drugstores. I had done them all, up and down the Pacific

Northwest with pharmacies open to close.

I think I feel personally rootless, so I think I just sort of...

put that into the characters or at least or I'm attracted to characters that I

read about that are like that.

I was a fan of Jack Kerouac and the characters in his books and Ginsberg's

poetry and then Burroughs.

When we made Drugstore Cowboy there was a character named Old Tom William S.

Burroughs.

He said he would play this character, but he wanted the guy to have something

going. Instead of just this old man who'd wasted years of his life on drugs,

he wanted this guy to be Tom the priest.

Father Murphy.

And he wrote all of his dialogue and made us shoot everything in one day,

which was hard because he had a big part.

These independent films reflect an awareness of the road movie as something

that used to be subversive, but they sort of poke fun at that.

With Stranger Than Paradise, immediately I'm thinking about their journey to

Cleveland. And it's just a whole grainy white

film.

It's irony, you know, which is something the road can also be.

That's why you have these great roadside attractions everywhere, you know, that

you have Cadillac Ranch and you have...

All of these crazy places along the American highway is just

purely American irony, which we lack in our culture. Americans don't like irony.

They either want to know, are you for it or against it, which is very true, you

know? And so when you're on the road, you actually get a sense that actually

we do have irony somewhere in us.

Could we borrow a car from Max?

Yeah, I guess.

Stranger Than Paradise is a road movie about not moving, in a way. I mean,

people talk about that film and how the characters don't say much or do much,

but it is loosely draped over a journey structure.

The woman arrives.

And then nothing happens.

And then they take this trip.

You think we're in Ohio yet?

And then nothing happens.

You know, it's funny.

You come to someplace new and everything looks just the same.

Well, I guess you broke parole now.

You guess.

Wild at Heart is one of my favorite movies.

It's so irreverent and so over the top.

Road movies change according to the censorship and what the audience will

tolerate and what the audience wants in that decade.

When you see something like Natural Born Killers, you see a form of gun crazy

that has in it the kinds of incredible violence that couldn't be depicted for

the mass audience in the 1950s.

It's a film that is a barrage to experience.

And I think visually, as well as with its soundtrack, like the Yuppie Road

movies, it reflects the time period.

I'm standing on Highway 666.

It is literally a candy lane of murder.

What I think is so compelling is its political critique of mass media.

I guess, Wayne, you just got to hold that old shotgun in your hand and it

becomes clear like it did for me the first time.

That's when I realized my one true calling in life.

And what's that, Mickey?

Shit, man.

I'm a natural born killer.

This man is sick!

This bad boy is going to Washington DC for the million man I

think

the road movie belongs to everybody, you know when it started it was about the

Western and I think that's a male genre and In the 90s, it really opened itself

up to you know being about everybody

Well, you don't know me very well, do you, Crepella? I'm the Latina Marilyn

Monroe. I got more legs than a bucket of chicken. The road movie belongs to the

drag queens and the Indians, the bikers and Easy Rider and the women in Thelma

and Louise.

It really belongs to all of us.

I really wanted to see a movie.

that was not about these women being supporting characters to other men.

I said I'm not going to hurt you, all right?

Relax. Stop it, please. I mean it. Thelma and Louise became outlaws because

to protect themselves, they ended up doing things that, although not legally

justifiable or rational, emotionally somehow made some kind of sense.

A person unencumbered is a really amazing thing.

I think they amaze themselves.

We live such prescribed lives.

Everybody has to be here at this time, there at this time. They have to think

this, vote that.

When you're out there, things just become more vivid.

You feel more like yourself.

I feel awake.

Good.

Wide awake.

i don't remember ever feeling this awake thelma and louise is one of my favorite

movies because they go all the way they decide we're going to keep going

i

saw them running out of world they had gotten so big

that they ran out of world what in the hell is this

i think that that in some way is the

experience of a lot of women.

The cage is too small.

That's what all the bellyaching is about.

It doesn't fit.

Let's keep going.

It was really their only choice.

I began to see America as my own, a child's map over which my child and I

could skim the light at will.

We wanted to stay on the road forever.

When I made Gas Food Lodging, it was the idea of, like, pulling off on one of the

exits to the truck stop and then wondering...

Who lives in this town? What types of lives do they live?

As soon as I'm out of here, you can do whatever the fuck you want.

Ooh, promises, promises.

Everything in gas food lodging is kind of transient because they actually live

in a trailer park, which, you know, even though trailers are static, they are on

wheels, you know?

There's always a sense that people could just pack that shit up really fast and

get the hell out of town.

So you clean carpets?

Uh, yeah.

Indian motels?

Yeah, some.

Mostly they clean their own coffees, though.

Yeah, I know.

That's where I live.

In a motel.

The seed for Mississippi Masala came from the fact that these people who were

in one place for all their lives were now on the edge of a highway where they

would only meet strangers forever is such a...

deep and poignant thought.

Hi. Hey.

These characters in American road movies, they always go beyond the

frontiers of their original families.

What are you gonna do now?

Thinking about going somewhere, I guess.

Can I come with you? It's about not leaving a predetermined life.

What?

Can I come with you?

It's about redefining what your place in the world can be. We're leaving

Mississippi to see what we can do.

They go beyond the frontiers of their social classes, in the case of Ernesto

Guevara and the motorcycle diaries.

They go beyond the frontiers of their own countries.

The media always makes the American films be talked about much more. I mean,

the fact is that the road exists everywhere.

fully crystallized.

I don't think that road movies can be very easily found in countries that are

very crystallized. You don't see Swiss road movies.

Did you guys got your passports?

Passports? Yeah.

You're leaving the res and you're going into a whole different country, cousin.

But it's the United States.

Damn right it is. That's as foreign as it gets.

Don't you even know how to be a real Indian?

I guess not.

First of all, quit grinning like an idiot.

Indians ain't supposed to smile like that. Get stoic.

You gotta look mean or people won't respect you.

White people will run all over you if you don't look mean.

You gotta look like a warrior.

Native peoples have been in movies since the very beginning.

In 1894, there were penny kaleidoscopes. Indian people were the

first subjects of those penny movies.

It's just strange to me that John Ford never thought beyond the limitations of

what he was taught or what he knew.

John Wayne's teeth!

John Wayne's teeth!

Are they plastic or are they steel?

Now that was kind of amazing.

That you've got Indians traveling the American landscape on the road is just

seriously deep to me.

We love the road movie in America because it's about the ideology that we

founded this country on. We wish we could just keep going.

But we all want to get to this place of sanctuary, of home.

For me, the road movie is really a metaphor for finding your way home.

The ache for home lives in all of us.

The safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.

In the straight story, this elder gentleman rediscovers the meaning of

home by virtue of being on the road.

It was a true story, and it was filmed on the actual route that the guy took

when he rode the lawnmower from, where was it, Iowa to Wisconsin?

I think it was 365 miles he rode this lawnmower.

In its straightforward simplicity, brilliant movie.

Beautiful movie.

I've often wondered what our old house would be like today.

Funny, I never forgot the address.

12 Locust Avenue.

Yes, sir.

12 Locust Avenue.

Can I help you, sir?

No, thanks.

I'm just looking around.

I used to live here.

Here in the store?

Yep. My childhood home was right on this spot.

When I knew that Jack Nicholson was going to play the lead, I was aware.

how he was an icon in those 70s films. I miss very much the cinema of alienation

that we had then.

There was a scene deleted that's on the DVD where we parody the famous

scene in Five Easy Pieces where he insults the waitress.

I'd like a plain omelet, no potatoes, tomatoes instead, cup of coffee, and

wheat toast.

No substitutions.

Oh, fine.

Um, I'll just have the potatoes.

I'll be back with your coffee.

In 72, I wanted to see more of the country and spent about two and a half

months on the road.

within a couple of days that what i wanted the trip to be was a source for a

visual diary and started photographing every bed i slept in every person i met

every meal i ate every toilet i used it was a very interesting time in american

culture time of transition it was the beginning of strip culture

when i was photographing some of the mom-and-pop places in the early 90s that

was kind of the final flowering in a way of that like 50s road culture because

now when i go past these places so much is relegated to abandonment so much is

ruined now

These days, it's the monocultural interstate.

The old days of the road, they don't really exist.

I feel like I've kind of updated my vision a little bit, getting into that

idea of the homogenization of the American landscape.

I'm working on a project that will be called Ubiquity. I'm taking one

photograph of a strip mall in all 50 states.

As Americans, we go through different stages.

You know, you're out of college or you're beginning your career and you

have sort of a blossoming and then there's kind of a maturing plateau that

happens and you realize that a lot of the ambitions and everything that you

had maybe were not really all that important or relevant.

Life isn't about trying to attain all these accomplishments and things like

that. It's, you know, maybe it's good enough to just be in the car and drive.

do do do do do

do do do do do do do do do do do

do do do do