All language subtitles for Story of Film - Ep 14 - 1990s - The First DAys of Digital

At the end of the 1800s a new art form
flickered into live.

It looked like our dreams.

Movies are multi-billion dollar
global entertainment industry now.

But what drives them
isn't box-office or showbiz.

It's passion, innovation!

So let's travel the world
to find this innovation for ourselves.

To discover it in this man,
Stanley Donen,

who made Singing in the Rain.

And in Jane Campion in Australia.

And in the films of Ky�ko Kagawa

who was in perhaps
the greatest movie ever made.

And Amitabh Bachchan,
the most famous actor in the world.

And in the movies
of Martin Scorcese and Spike Lee,

Lars Von Trier and Akira Kurosawa.

Welcome to the story of film,
an odyssey.

An epic tale of innovation
across twelve decades,

six continents
and a thousand films.

In this chapter we explore
the movies of the Coen brothers

and Quentin Tarantino and discover
Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet.

Almost every film made
during the first 100 years

of the story of film
was made like this.

To get a shot to move through space,
you put the camera on something that moved.

To film a deer, as we do here,
fleetingly,

you had to find a real
deer and photograph it.

Unless, of course, you drew
an animated deer like Bambi.

But then came
the first days of digital.

Look at this shot.

Smoke coming out of buildings.

Sunlight from top right.

It looks like the camera
was on a helicopter.

All attempts to make the shot
look like a real city,

photographed, but it isn't.

These tiny horses kicking up dust,
look like the deer in the previous shot,

but they're not.

A place like this
is where this shot was made.

Almost everything in the shot
was drawn on a computer, like this one.

D.W. Griffith had to put
a camera on a giant crane

to create this gliding shot
of an ancient city.

Here, in the first days of digital,
director Ridley Scott

wanted to create a gliding,
epic shot of an ancient city

with tiny people,
like ants, too.

Computers became central
to cinema in the 1990s.

Instead of film imagery being made up
of tiny grains of silver halide on celluloid,

it became tiny rows
of digital information: ones and zeros.

In 1921, a boy electrician called
Philo Farnsworth, was plowing a field.

He looked at the rows of earth
and realized that imagery could be made

of tiny rows of picture information too,
scanned at incredible speeds.

Jump 70 years, and you get this.

A liquid-metal representation of a person
turns into a photographed actor.

Director James Cameron,
had his design and technical teams

scan the photographed image
into the computer.

Then they drew shiny surfaces,
movements, and reflections

to make it look like the man
had become Mercury.

The technique became known as
computer generated imagery, CGI.

Live action and animation
had been combined before,

as far back as Gene Kelly dancing with
Jerry mouse in Anchors Aweigh.

But this was crucially different,
Jerry looked 2-dimensional.

The light on him doesn't change.

He looked like he'd been drawn.

But the liquid-metal man looked
like he'd been photographed.

The metal seemed to have real substance,
as if it was actually in the helicopter here,

reflecting the light in the shot
and the head of the pilot.

Get out.

The implications
were astonishing.

It was if cinema had been rewound
and started again, from the olden days.

The first animators tried
to show a dinosaur.

The wobbly lines show that it was drawn
with real human hands.

Now, Steven Spielberg could
do so with such hyper-realism

that we could almost smell
a dinosaur's breath.

Apprehend the texture
of the dinosaur's skin.

The shadows cast by the small one,
the reflections on the floor

of the feet
of the T-Rex.

This is the only surviving footage
of the ocean liner, the Titanic.

A flickering pan right that shows
its massiveness, its hope.

As we watch we imagine
the grand tragedy that befell it.

Eighty years later, James Cameron
shows us what we've long wanted to see,

as if it had
actually been photographed.

The sinking liner, by the light
of the silvery moon.

Shots filmed in deep space
to show the height of the boat

and the length of the jump.

Seventies cinema had been
about what we wanted to see:

Jaws, The Exorcist, Star Wars.

Nineties cinema had become "can
see."

This was exciting.

Movies had become spectacle again,
about the thrill of seeing,

as if for the first time.

But once the thrill has passed,
old questions remain.

The first is about admiration
or ethics.

Real human courage and imagination
goes into a shot like this.

The camera and the guy
are really strapped to the plane

as it does
a scary loop-the-loop.

Hard work and long hours
spent in relative comfort,

eating pizza,
go into a shot like this.

Despite its bravura,
has reality lost some of its realness?

The second old question
is a human question.

It's the theme
of the story of film.

Innovation.

All techniques, including CGI,
should be used inventively.

The first mainstream feature film
to be made

entirely with a computer
was this inventive one.

Director John Lassiter and his team
use the new possibilities of CGI

to render shadows,
do dynamic deep staging,

and see from positions that would be
difficult for a real camera to shoot from.

This was the pricey end of CGI but, as always,
innovation doesn't need to be expensive.

This film was not only shot
mostly on low-tech digital video,

but marketed on the Internet.

It has the look and sound
of camcorder video footage.

His voice is close to the camera,
recorded by its internal mic.

The whites in her face burn out,
a very video effect.

In the same year
digital cinemas opened up

in America, Korea,
Spain, Germany, and Mexico.

And, in 2001 to 2002,
George Lucas shot

Star Wars: Episode 2 entirely
without using celluloid.

And, as has often been
the case in the story of film,

Asian filmmakers
were even more innovative.

Here's Zhang Yimou's
House of Flying Daggers."

A blind dancer.

To challenge her, a man flicks a bean
against drums, to create sounds around her.

The camera rushes forward
with the bean, then swishes left.

The bean's computer generated.

Motion blur,
again computer generated.

Then her sleeve garment
picks up a CGI sword.

Then the man
throws a CGI plate at her.

She's seeing and not seeing,
but so are we.

Images doing things
they could never do before,

all with brilliant
Chinese choreography and grace.

Remarkable innovation.

The theme of the story of film.

But if what ran
through the camera in the '90s,

digital tape rather
than celluloid, changed.

What ran in front of the camera
seemed to change too.

Reality seemed
to lose some of its realness.

Life was no longer just modern,
it became postmodern, playful.

In the '90s, American films
like Schindler's List, LA confidential,

and The Silence of the Lambs
were serious '40s genre pictures,

in new guises.

But the real flavors of the times
were irony and postmodernism.

The idea that there are no great truths
and that everything's recycled.

More than previously, filmmakers started
playing games with old genres,

quoting from previous films,
making films about films.

Even the master
of new American cinema of the '70s,

Martin Scorsese,
started doing this.

Look at the ending
of Scorsese's film, Goodfellas.

Like several of his movies,
it's about gangsters.

But what's different is
that this gangster

looks right into the camera,
a very post-modern thing to do.

I'm an average nobody.

I get to live the rest
of my life like a schnook.

And then, out of nowhere,
Joe Pesci shoots right down the lens.

A surprising shot, until we remember
that one of the oldest films ever made,

The Great Train Robbery,
did the same thing.

Scorsese knew this shot
and repeated it.

Film quoting film.

A very '90s thing to do.

American movies of the '90s were
full of playful twists on old films.

In this classic film noir
from the '40s, for example,

two killers
are about to do a hit.

The lighting's dark,
the shadows are from German expressionism

and, typically,
the killers don't say much.

There's little dialogue.

Compare that to this scene
of two killers about to do a hit

in one of the most influential gangster
pictures of the '90s, Pulp Fiction.

The lighting's much brighter
but what's more noticeable

is that in Pulp Fiction,
they talk.

A lot.

Talking about everyday stuff,
like foot massages,

isn't exactly something
that Humphrey Bogart would have done.

Scenes like this breathed new life
into American screenplay writing.

They stopped the story
but opened up the discourse.

They have no sense of humor
about this shit!

You know what I'm saying?

It's an interesting point.

Come on.
Let's get into character.

It's as if they'd been
out of character.

Like they forgot
that they're in a movie.

What's her name again?

Mia.

Mia.

As if to emphasize the dialogue,
the shot remains static,

behind the two guys,
so we listen rather than look.

Take care of her?

No, man.

Just take her out, you know?

Show her a good time.
Make sure she don't get lonely.

You gonna be taking
Mia Wallace out on a date?

It is not a date.

You know, it's just...
it's like if you were

going to take your buddy's wife
to a movie, or something.

It's just good company,
that's all.

It's not a date.

It's definitely not a date.

This emphasis on the surrealism
of everyday talk

became known as Tarantino-esque,
after the film's writer-director

Quentin Tarantino.

Tarantino-esque somehow meant both more real,
and less real than life at the same time.

And Tarantino wasn't only
significant for his dialogue.

Like Scorsese, he was
a hyperlink to film history.

For example he championed in America
this Hong Kong director Wuen Woo-Ping,

whom we've already met.

Tarantino then hired master Yuen
to choreograph the Kill Bill films.

And look at this scene
in Tarantino's film Reservoir Dogs.

In long lens, wearing black glasses,
Harvey Keitel shoots the police with two guns.

Five years earlier, in Ringo Lam's
Hong Kong film, City on Fire,

Danny Lee, in black glasses,
shoots the police with two guns.

And here's the climax of
Reservoir Dogs.

Three jewel thieves
pull guns on each other.

A death triangle.

A warehouse.

A police mole's bleeding.

Wide shot then close-ups.

The thieves have just done
a failed heist.

Joey, if you kill that man,
you die next.

Repeat.

If you kill that man,
you die next.

Larry, we have been friends...

And here's the climax of
City on Fire.

Three Jewel thieves
pull guns on each other.

A death triangle.

We're in a warehouse.

A police mole
is sitting below them.

Wide shot then close ups.

The thieves have just done
a failed heist.

Talk about d�j� vu.

Movie making
about the story of film.

And it wasn't only action cinema
that Tarantino admired.

He loved this art movie,
Jean Luc Godard's Bande � Part.

This is its title sequence.

Fast cut close ups
of the main characters,

the letters cutting
graphically up on screen.

Tarantino used this title
for his own production company,

a band apart.

He was punning on film history.

How '90s.

His company logo appeared
graphically, yellow on black,

at the start of "Pulp Fiction."

Tarantino's postmodernism
was in his writing,

but a look at Natural Born Killers,
made by Oliver Stone

from Tarantino's screenplay, shows that,
visually, Tarantino was a traditionalist.

A young couple is on a rampage.

Stone has this scene shot on film,
on a glide cam, and graded green.

This P.O.V. shot is also on film,
but in full color.

Then we're on handheld video.

This mash up of styles is almost
a definition of postmodernism.

No one type of image
could capture the truth.

Reality was multiple
and fragmented.

A fourth strain of '90s postmodernism
was the kooky, technically brilliant,

films of Minnesota born brothers
Joel and Ethan Coen.

They started the '90s
with this great image.

A hat falls into the foreground.

Trees are out of focus.

Then the wind blows the hat
and the focus follows it.

The forest comes into focus.

Then the story begins.

The Coen brothers became masters
of visual and story precision.

By the mid-'90s, the Coens had honed
their comic-discrepant world view

by focusing on what used
to be called, in Frank Capra films,

the "little man," caught up in events
that he barely understands.

Here the little man is
a novice mailroom worker.

But he becomes a chief executive
with the big cigar to show it.

The film's shot
in blues and Navy's.

The novice
is pure Coen brothers.

A gormless, rather asexual man,
out of his depth,

having strayed into the world of Capra,
or Preston Sturges, or Howard Hawks.

George Clooney played a similar trespasser
in O Brother, where art thou?

Clooney was wide eyed
and clueless.

The imagery this time
was golden.

And talk about wide eyed.

Here's Jeff Bridges,
high as a kite, in The big Leboswki.

A tower of ten pin
bowling shoes.

His are handed out
by Saddam Hussein.

The war on Iraq was on
and the Coen's wanted to refer to it.

And then we're in another '30s genre,
the Busby Berkley musical.

The big Leboswki brilliantly married
slacker dude-ness with surreal design,

a fondness
for old Hollywood and '90s politics.

The Coen's affection for their men
gave their postmodernism heart.

The most daring
American postmodernist of the '90s,

and one of the country's greatest filmmakers,
was this man: Gus Van Sant.

He's influenced by a wide range
of movies, styles and periods,

and refers to them as he talks.

Van Sant's film, My own private Idaho,"
was about this young narcoleptic hustler.

To show what the hustler feels like
when he has an orgasm,

Van Sant used the image
of a barn falling onto a road.

Seldom had a sex scene been
pictured so imaginatively.

I think when I was a painter
and I think by the time I stopped painting,

the last thing
I was painting were these landscapes.

And definitely in My own private Idaho
for instance,

the whole barn crashing into the landscape
was literally from one of the paintings.

The film was full of empty landscape shots,
golden light, the open road.

Van Sant had intended
to shoot other images,

and use them to show what the hustler
felt as he lost consciousness,

but he didn't
have time to film them.

But we did have the one image
of the barn falling.

So, since I had this, like,
singular image, which was somewhat like,

I guess, the singular image in The Shining,
of the blood coming out of the elevator.

It was this one stand-alone special effect
that was really beautiful.

So, we tried it just right
in the middle of his orgasm

because it was another kind
of falling, you know, I think.

Van Sant's signature film,
Elephant,

was also about
the fall from grace of young men.

No movie of the '90s was more
complexly connected to film history.

Elephant was a response
to the shootings at a school in Columbine.

The film's shot
in the unfashionable, 4x3 screen ratio.

Van Sant follows
young men with a steadicam.

There's little dialogue.

The violence is unexplained.

Fourteen years earlier,
the British director, Alan Clarke,

made a film called Elephant, which used
steadicam to show the driven,

almost trance-like walking
of gunmen in northern Ireland.

HBO was the only company
that was interested in not making

Columbine, but they were
interested in making Elephant

and they were referring
to the Alan Clarke film.

So it became known
to us as Elephant,

because of that label and I think
it was a sort of similar statement

it was a very abstract
statement about Columbine.

The constant walking
in Clarke's Elephant,

influenced the forward walking
in real time, without much cutting,

in Van Sant's Elephant,
and in his earlier movie, Gerry.

These films felt, in some way,
like video games,

which became
a new influence on '90s cinema.

This one, Tomb Raider,
with its image tracking forward

to follow the main character, from place
to place, was particularly popular.

Yeah, the videogame aspect is,
including "Gerry" and "Last Days,"

is coming from video games.

Me playing video games
was an effort for me to understand

what was going on
with the Columbine characters

because it was said
that they had played video games

and so I didn't know
what they were.

And I had a computer
and my assistant said,

"oh, well you can download
the first level of 'Tomb Raider, '"

and I was like, "what's 'Tomb Raider?'"
and he said,

"oh, that's just like a game, you know?

There's lots of different games."

I said, "oh there's different ones?"
Like, I didn't know anything about it.

They were playing "Doom,"
which is a different game,

but I guess you couldn't find "Doom"
on the computer

so I started playing "Tomb Raider"
and became very, you know, amused by it,

and occupied by it in the way people
do become occupied by video games.

And so the video games
were also informing.

Video games are often doing
what we were doing in "Gerry."

To get from point a to point b
you have to actually travel there.

You can't cut like in cinema.

You cut to the new location.

You actually, like, walk.

Like in reality.

Because of that I started thinking
about like, cinema like that.

And if the influences on Van Sant
weren't already rich enough,

he then saw the brilliant
Hungarian films of B�la Tarr.

Tarr's S�t�ntang� shows the beauty
of walking too,

the epic forward camera moves,
and the expressionism of blowing litter.

Compare this
to Van Sant's film, Gerry.

But this obsession
with the beauty of walking,

moving through space in real time,
couldn't be applied to another

Van Sant film, Last Days,

which was inspired by the death
of rock star Kurt Cobain.

We had made "Elephant", which
was very long, pensive, travelling shots

down the hallways of the high-school,
that recalled B�la's work.

And we had... Now we're in a house
which had no expansive hallways.

And so our DP, sort of like thought
of "Jeanne Dielman" and thought

maybe we should think in terms
of that rather than travelling shots.

Maybe, you know,
maybe more fixed shots which we did.

Jeanne Dielman
is full of such fixed shots.

It's this Belgian film by
Chantal Akerman.

Akerman films square on,
in kitchens and domestic settings.

Some of the shots of the rock star
in Last Days are remarkably similar.

- "Jeanne Dielman" is one
of my favorite films

and, in fact, in this documentary that
we're making, in our section on Ozu...

- Right, right.

We put in a bit of Dielman
because the camera is as low as in Ozu.

Yeah.

Ozu was also on our minds,
and because of the...

Where you have your camera
now, I mean, it was,

you know, however many...
30 inches off the ground.

I think it was, like,
a 40-millimeter lens, and so, yeah.

We always had it like,
you know, 36 inches off the ground

and it was always
a 35-millimeter lens.

But not even Van Sant's close reworking
of Ozu and European cinema

prepared us for this shot for shot remake
of Alfred Hitchcock's film, Psycho.

The original was based
on a true story.

The remake was based on a film.

Anne Heche was playing
not so much a real person,

as a movie star
playing a real person.

Welcome to the first days
of digital.

Van Sant's movie departed from the original
only in tiny details, such as here,

where he inserts unexpected shots of clouds
into the famous shower sequence.

At the moment of death,
Van Sant's woman's pupil dilates.

And in the '90s
you could show more nudity.

Van Sant couldn't quite keep
his instinctive surrealism in check

but, strangely, thinks his film
is very different from Hitchcock's.

The intentions of the movie
was to see what would happen

if you tried to, you know,
literally do the same thing.

What did happen, and,
what I learned from it,

was that even though
your camera angles are actually the same,

the performances are close,
but the kind of intentions of the filmmaker

and the soul
of the filmmaker is different.

My "Psycho" became devoid of

like some of the most important things
that were in the original

which were these sort of dark,
underlying tensions.

You know, in mine, it's...

the dark underlying tensions
are kind of, like, not there.

There's something else there
that doesn't really fit

with what "Psycho" is,
so it kind of became a, you know,

an example of like how you
can't really copy something.

I think that... I think it's just
the way that I've been,

you know, creating and relating
to film, structurally.

As being a language all its own

and being basically, the language itself,
being what the film is about, you know.

What films are generally about.

They can have subjects but in the end it's
the language that's the true subject.

Jump from Gus Van Sant to this man
in the first days of digital,

and you find someone pushing cinema
even further in the direction of art and ideas.

The New York times called him,
"the greatest artist of his generation."

Matthew Barney
used to be a sportsman.

And just like sportsmen
work up a sweat,

building their bodies, so Barney works
up a sweat making his films.

Here he is doing something
like indoor rock climbing.

But this is no ordinary scene.

Barney's playing a character.

An apprentice-artist,
working hard at his art.

The film's called Cremaster,
after the cremaster muscle

that makes
human testicles rise and fall.

Barney rises,
but other things fall.

And we're in the Guggenheim museum
in New York.

In Barney's film,
it represents a human vagina,

and New York's Chrysler
building represents a penis.

Barney is dressed in Scottish tartan
because in 1992,

he did a drawing of a bagpipe
with five pipes,

each representing a place
where he would film.

One of the places was New York.

That's why we're here.

Maybe this makes the film
sound overloaded with symbolism

but it has the beauty and determination
of this silent comedy,

in which Harold Lloyd
climbs a building.

Lloyd encounters obstacles too.

His climb is a vertical storyline
of little incidents, like Barney's.

Now Barney's apprentice has reached
the top of the Guggenheim,

where we encounter his master,
the sculptor, Richard Serra.

In dark clothes here,

who's melting vaseline
which will trickle down

the corkscrew of the building.

Rise and fall.

Barney the surrealist loves
the texture of vaseline.

On lower levels we glimpse a punk band
who've impeded Barney's climb.

The first days of digital were full of films
referring to other movies and ideas,

but few looked from such
a great height as Barney's.

There are five cremaster films.

They're a movie world
all of their own.

The coming of digital
and postmodernism in cinema

made America in the '90s
fizz like lemonade,

but the movies of the times
were innovative in another way.

Through satire.

Two of the ballsiest satires
of the late '80s and '90s

were directed by Paul Verhoeven
and written by this man, Ed Neumeier,

who's as hyperactive
and as full of ideas

as his films, and his times.

Their first collaboration
was Robocop.

It was certainly a reaction
to what was in the Reagan era,

particularly though...
it was a reaction to...

There was in the '80s,
there was a period where businessmen...

Japan was on the rise,
and businessmen started kind of reading

those samurai books and talking
about themselves as killers.

And so there was this notion
of trying to bring actual violence

into the boardroom, as it were.

That was part of the idea.

You now have 15 seconds
to comply.

Businessmen want to make money
by launching this new police robot.

It roars like a lion.

We're in a typical
power boardroom.

Fast cutting.

Steely blue colors.

I am now authorized
to use physical force.

I had a theory,
which is not an original theory,

that if you did something very violent
in a movie and then you told a joke,

that you would use...

The tension of the violence
would come out in the laugh.

Can you pull the plug
on this thing?

Don't touch him!

Don't touch him!

He didn't hear it!

Dick, I'm very disappointed.

I'm sure it's only a glitch.

A temporary setback.

You call this a glitch!?

But the businessmen try again
and come up

with a more liberal
policing machine this time,

a dead cop brought back
to life as Robocop.

What their parents only read
about in comic books.

Robo!
Excuse me, robo!

Any special message
for all the kids watching at home?

Stay out of trouble.

Neumeier wrote scenes
that mocked the happy talk of TV news,

the kind of satirical writing
that we saw in films

like The Graduate
and Catch 22, written by Buck Henry.

I think that people like Buck Henry
were luckier because

they were working at a time
where you could be a little bit more free

about making those kinds of comments
and being overtly satirical.

We've also moved into an era
of marketing

and sort of the corporate
blockbuster era

where they're really going
for the widest possible audience.

They want what they call "four quadrants,"
they want everybody to like the picture

and they want them to like it
all over the world,

almost regardless of culture.

Ten years after Robocop,

Neumeier penned this even
more satirical postmodern film,

which was based
on a rabidly right-wing novel

about the threat
to humans by alien bugs.

The battle scenes were
as exciting as Star Wars.

The bugs were
entirely computer generated.

The look was bright and shiny,
the sound track was explosive.

That scene where Johnny walks in,
Johnny Rico walks in

to the brain bug cavern
and confronts the brain bug, is, you know,

that's every American,
maybe not just American,

but that's every soldier
in the world coming in saying,

"yeah, you may be smart,
but I got a gun," you know?

And "now who's smart?"

Do you know what this is?

Sure you do.

You're some kind of big, fat,
smart bug aren't you?

But the politics
of Starship Troopers

went deeper than making fun
of macho soldiers

and came from a surprising source.

Paul said, �oh I've always
wanted to make this movie set

in Germany in 1935
and it's about a bunch of teenagers.

And they're all coming into their life,
and its exciting time,

and things are happening in the country,
and everybody's joining the Nazi party.�

And the thing that he thought,
that what was amusing to him

was he said,
�and nobody knew it was wrong.�

And I said to him, "oh, they'll
never let us do that!"

In Hollywood, a real story
about 1935 Nazi Germany, you know.

Young Nazi's who before
they know they're bad.

But that's
where Starship came in.

It's about, oh, I guess,
it was about 5 years later I thought,

�oh, you could do that with this.�

Officer on deck.

Carry on.

Varial detail.

Dismissed.

I think some people
consider it camp.

And what Paul and I
decided to do was

we decided not to tell anybody
what we were doing.

We decided never, ever let on,
"oh yeah, these are the bad guys,

these are the good guys,"
whatever.

We just played it straight
down the middle.

We sort of tip our hand
in the third act

where Neil Patrick Harris comes
out in a Nazi uniform.

And that was a bit
of a controversial decision

because originally you were supposed
to understand that through his speech only.

He makes a speech
about numbers and this and that

and "i have to kill
people every day."

It's a very fascistic idea.

You don't approve?

Well too bad.

We're in this for the species,
boys and girls.

It's simple numbers.

They have more.

And every day I have
to make decisions

that send hundreds of people
like you to their deaths.

Didn't they tell you, colonel?

That's what
the mobile infantry's good for.

Later I think we both decided
that that was,

to make sure you got it,
that that was really the moment.

And I think the audience
doesn't like that moment.

I remember being in a preview
with...

In the bathroom afterwards
when all these young men were coming in,

they'd seen the picture
and they were kind of upset

because this was a picture
they wanted to embrace

but something in that ending had said,
no, maybe these aren't your heroes

or maybe there's something...
I think it put a little bit of doubt

into them about it or something like that.
I don't know.

Whatcha thinking, colonel?

This is the ending that Neumeier mentions,
filmed in golden hues.

The enemy is humiliated.

Tied up.

It has a doleful look.

It's afraid.

It's afraid!

Triumphal music begins to play.

Science fiction particularly
allows you to do things politically

that you wouldn't do...

That might not be accepted
as easily if you did them straight

because it's not here,
it's slightly over here.

It's a little bit skewed
and I think humor does the same thing.

And if you add them together
in the right way

then you can probably get away
with murder if you want.

Neumeier and Verhoeven combine
science fiction and politics

to create the spiciest entertainment
cinema of their times.

On the other side of the world
from America in the '90s,

in Australia and New Zealand, at first
it looks like the big trends of the time,

digital, post modernism,
and satire, were having no impact.

This New Zealand director,
Jane Campion,

emphasizes one of the timeless themes
in the story of film,

that to make great movies you must
get your unconscious juices flowing.

The unconscious mind is
a little bit like a quite shy pet.

And you have to set conditions
where it trusts

that if it comes out and plays
you'll feed it, you'll pay attention to it,

you won't ignore it,
you won't scare it.

So, like, when I first started writing,
one of the things that I realized

was that, you know, like,
for the first, like,

3 hours when you sit down to something,
you know, nothing really happens.

It's like it's testing you:
Will you stay for that fourth hour?

I always thought...
I always think, you have to create

a very safe environment,
you know, personally for yourself.

And also, I think, when you collaborate
with actors and people like that too.

Their unconscious selves,
you know, which you want to get into play

because that's where the genius is.

It's also shy, it's when
you know it's going to be safe.

Once all the signs, you know?

That, you can make mistakes,
it doesn't matter,

you can be a fool,
it doesn't matter.

We're here to play really.
You know?

Campion's great film
An Angel at my Table,

is about this very thing.

A shy young woman
with a lively unconscious mind,

Janet Frame,
doesn't feel safe in the world.

Frame's training
to be a teacher.

The whole class is looking,
and so is the training assessor.

In this moment, Frame freezes,
has a panic attack.

Campion and actress, Kerry Fox,
focused the scene on a piece of chalk.

Campion has it filmed
in close-up.

I didn't know why, "that will work",
that's what I thought, "that will work."

I was looking for something,
you know.

I have to admit that when I
was doing that I was going:

"Well what's going
to make her turn," you know?

How can we visually
kind of do something with it?

And then just the idea
that I guess her world

kind of crunched
into that piece of chalk.

I like to be able to say,
"look, I'm really, "

if I need to, " I'm confused
about what to do next."

You know, I'm not really sure we've got
this scene or I'm not feeling the drama.

It's all about a feeling for me,
again, you know.

If I'm feeling it through my body,
I can feel it if it's happening

and if it's not you have to say
something, because you can't pretend.

You know?

You've got to kind
of explore it.

I think one of the things
I believe is that you have to be

strong about vulnerability,
you know, like, stand up for it.

And stand up for gentleness
and softness

'cause I think they're
really powerful qualities.

And...'Cause I think, you know,
the so called "bluff leadership"

qualities of you know,
megaphone type voice on set,

isn't really helpful when it comes for,
you know, actors feeling anxious and nervous

and trying to make themselves vulnerable
because they're trying to find their channel too.

You know, trust their instrument
and if they,

"everybody! Okay! One, two, three. Off you
go, argh, argh, argh." You know?

It doesn't respond.

So I always try to create a really
relaxing and forgiving atmosphere.

Campion's film, The Piano,
used very subjective images and sounds

to suggest the inner world
of a girl who's growing up.

Here the child is looking
through her fingers.

They look like red curtains
about to open onto life.

The voice you hear
is not my speaking voice.

But my mind's voice.

I have not spoken
since I was 6 years old.

No one knows why.
Not even me.

The Piano is the only film
directed by a woman

to win the Palme d'Or
at the Cannes film festival.

The majority of, and the highest paid,
screenwriters in early Hollywood

were women, but then
filmmaking became more male.

Women make up about 50%
of the whole world,

but there's only about 3%
of women who are directors

or are actually
probably selecting content.

And, you know, it just seems to
me really sad that...

Because women's, I think, interests
are a lot more, a lot different

than male interests in large, you know,
they're, I think, they're a lot more nurturing.

They're much more orientated
to connection.

And male interests are much more
interested in, sort of, building,

identifying their, sort of,
blustering egos or whatever.

Bombing things, blowing things up, being
strong men, Spiderman or whatever, you know?

Which I don't think women do
and I think, you know,

what's important is to try
and not change the guys.

I mean, I think it's fun
what they do but to,

sort of, get the balance, you
know, have what women do.

But because most of the men
run the business I think that's...

They understand or identify much
better with what the male interests.

But the audience is actually
probably more identifiably female.

Sometimes one of the great
betrayals of the female

is that they want to see
themselves through male eyes.

So they're very interested in
what men do too.

If Jane Campion was the Ingmar Bergman
of Australasian cinema,

making films about
intense human psychology,

this man, Baz Luhrmann was
its flamboyant Vincent Minnelli.

Campion's films could have been made
in the 1920s

but Luhrmann's bring us
carousing back into the postmodern '90s.

Baz Luhrmann defined
the first days of digital.

Like the man himself,
his films are a meteor shower

of references to everything
from Shakespeare to Bollywood.

Shakespeare and Bollywood cinema
had something in common

and what they had in common
was the blindness to taste

or style or any of those imposed...
Posed ideals about art.

What they were singularly focused on
was the engagement

of as many human beings as possible,
from as many types of humanity,

to be moved
and touched by story.

To deliver a big idea, a big idea
through an emotional experience.

Luhrmann used
these all-encompassing ideas

about emotion and art,
what he called participatory cinema,

to make one of the key films
of the '90s,

his hyperactive version of
Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet."

Captions, fireworks,
splintered edits, flash forwards, choirs.

A dog of the house of Capulet!

Shakespeare starts "Romeo and Juliet'
with very broad, high comedy.

You know?
Standup routine, really.

You know?
Almost addressed to camera.

You know? But it had to be broad,
it had to be fun, it had to be standup.

Right? To engage the audience,
to disarm all of them,

before he suddenly goes:
Enter the romantic lead.

Romeo.

Leonardo DiCaprio, back lit,
at sunrise, long lens.

In the text the boys meet
in the town square.

We're now transporting
"Romeo and Juliet"

to a contemporary world
that is Miami life,

where religion and politics
are mixed up with each other.

There is no town square
in an American contemporary city.

But there is a gas station.

Because everybody, they don't ride horses,
they drive in trucks and cars.

Where do those cars meet?
At the gas station.

Where is the town square?
The gas station.

What if we ironically quote
the world of cinema?

What if it is like a Sergio Leone,
you know, piece of cinema?

And what if it's like a western?

Right?

That would be a good way
of doing that.

Sergio Leone shootout meets the town
square gas station in high comedy style.

Whether you think
we've done it well or not,

if you look at that sequence
I think you can see

that that set of choices
has at least led to that result.

Whether you agree with it or not,
that's how we got there.

I will bite my thumb at them
which is a disgrace to them, if they bear it.

Shakespeare's exact comic dialogue.

But his swords are guns here.

And knights have become
street kids in Hawaiian shirts.

I do bite my thumb, sir.

Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?

Is the law of our side,
if I say aye?

No.

No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you,
sir, but I bite my thumb, sir.

Do you quarrel, sir?

Quarrel, sir!

No, sir.

But if you do, sir, I am for you:
I serve as good a man as you.

No better?

A Sergio Leone gunfight shot
in close-up.

A track in.

Draw, if you be men!

Part, fools!

You know not what you do.

A Leone widescreen composition
and the pan pipe music from his films.

One of Luhrmann's biggest challenges
in the film was how to stage,

in an innovative way,
the famous scene

where Romeo and Juliet
meet for the first time.

The audience know
this is going to happen.

How can it happen a way
in which their delicious expectation

and enjoyment of,
"it's going to happen,"

can be suspended so that,
when it happens,

it's a surprise that they knew
was going to happen.

It was so perplexing.

We were in Miami
and this is, I suppose,

the spontaneous,
artistic, creative bit of it.

That night we went out to dinner
and there was a nightclub.

What happened was
I went to the bathroom.

And I was thinking
about the problem.

I go into the bathroom,
I'm thinking about the problem,

and as I am down washing my hands I look
up and can see a girl's hair.

And I look and I think,
"this is the most brilliant thing."

It's the anti-chamber
of the girl's bathroom.

And after you come out of the bathroom,
like I was, you wash your hands,

you comb your hair and there's a fish tank
dividing the boy and the girl's anti-chamber.

And it was as simple as going:
"That's it! That's the moment."

And that's where it came from.

So it was a combination
of extremely academic work,

followed by methodology, just work,
labor, process, and

I think maybe being open
to the world around us, and luck.

So that's how it happened,
that was that one.

Luhrmann's "Moulin Rouge" took his ideas
about innovative cinema even further.

At the start of the film,
the camera sweeps

through model and computer generated shots
of the gray, dank alleyways of Paris,

and then swoops up
to the garret of a poet.

His face tear stained
because he has loved and lost

a beautiful courtesan.

Then we flash back
to the famous nightclub, the Moulin Rouge,

where the love story took place.

It's a frenzied, red, Luhrmann world
of wild postmodern song, and love, and space.

At one point the girls sing
"voulez-vous couchez avec moi?"

from LaBelle's Lady Marmalade
whilst the men crash into

the chorus of nirvana's,
"Smells like teen spirit."

No-one in the world was mashing up
Sergio Leone, MTV, Hispanic telenovelas,

fashion, cross-dressing,
and the kaleidoscopic cinema

of '90s Hong Kong
with such aplomb.

Reality had lost
its realness in Bazland.

The very definition
of the first days of digital.

Luhrmann called Strictly Ballroom,
Romeo + Juliet,

and Moulin Rouge
the red curtain trilogy.

To make them he set himself rules,
a kind of manifesto,

that were almost the opposite
of Lars Von Trier's dogma rules,

the other great
'90s movie manifesto.

The first of Luhrmann's rules
was that we need to know the story upfront.

You get the feeling...

I mean, "Moulin Rouge" opens, I think,
with the opening line, it's something like,

"the woman I loved is dead.
She was the star of the Moulin Rouge."

"Romeo + Juliet" opens
with something like,

"doth with their death
bury their parents strife."

You are told right up front
that the lovers or a lover is going to die.

And by the way, a recent epic, sort of,
participatory cinematic work

in the beginning called, "Titanic,"
it's pretty clear in the beginning

one of them's going to end up
below the waters.

So, you... That's one rule:
You know where it's going to conclude.

Two, in this red curtain trilogy,

to keep the audience alive
and, by the way,

it's kind of after the fact.

I say you've got to have
a device, right?

A distancing device.

But really, why would you do
a musical without music?

But essentially there's got to be something
that keeps the whole cinematic experience heightened.

So you don't fall into, ever, a feeling
that it's somehow "keyhole."

That's it's psychological.

You know? In the case
of "Strictly Ballroom," you know?

Even dramatic scenes
are danced out, you know?

"Wes, come here!" You know?
It's dance.

And "Romeo + Juliet" it's the
language, you know?

"Do you bite your thumb
at me, sir?"

And then "Moulin Rouge,"
of course, it's song, it's music.

? I was made ?

? for loving you, baby ?

? you were made for loving me ?

? the only way of lovin' me ?

? baby, is to pay a lovely fee ?

? just one night ?

? just one night ?

? there's no way ?

? 'cause you can't pay ?

? in the name of love ?

? one night ?

? in the name of love ?

Visually this is pure romantic cinema:
moonlight, a rooftop tryst,

reverse angle
editing, two shots.

But the music is a wild '90s
mash up of pop songs,

used almost like dialogue, as if reality
had been remixed by a DJ.

? Don't leave me this way ?

? you think that people ?

? would have had enough ?

? of silly love songs ?

? I look around me ?

? and I see it isn't so ?

In this participatory cinema,
in particular, say, a musical,

you need to know where it's heading
and you need the story to be extremely linear.

One thing happens precisely
after the other, like math,

so that you can save time,
so that you can take the human moment,

"oh, I love you, I love you, I love you,"
which in a psychological scene might be,

"you know, I really love you."

And music, and the expression
of that could take an extra 3 minutes.

And we could expand the emotional experience
of that beyond the reality in life.

And that's where the romanticism
comes in is that we're making

something that happens in life,
better than it is in life.

Bigger than it is in life.

Better and bigger than life.

Exactly what many movie
makers aimed for

in the last days of digital
at the end of the old millennium.

The story of film was full
of the fizz and feedback

of those days, and the rapture
of self-loss.

But then came the 21st century.

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