DETECTIVE MARTINEZ
You’re in LA. Everybody needs a lawyer.
Dir: Richard Rush • Scr: Matthew Chapman, Billy Ray • Cast: Bruce Willis (Dr Bill Capa), Rubén Blades (Detective Hector Martinez)
1994 DISCLOSURE
A lawyer tries to dissuade her client from taking action after he has been sexually harassed by his female boss.
CATHERINE
If you sue, you’ll never get another job in the computer business; if you don’t sue they’ll bury you in Austin. If you sue it’s news; if you don’t it’s gossip. If you sue nobody will believe you; if you don’t, your wife won’t. They will make your life into a living hell for the next three years until this case goes to trial. And for that privilege, it’s going to cost you a minimum of a hundred thousand dollars. Do you not think it’s a game, Mr Sanders? It’s a game to them. How do you feel about losing?
Dir: Barry Levinson • Scr: Paul Attanasio • Based on a novel by Michael Crichton • Cast: Roma Maffia (Catherine Alvarez)
1995 DEAD MAN WALKING
A guard supervising an inmate on death row is surprised by the compassion shown by a visitor.
SISTER PREJEAN
I just don’t see the sense of killing people to say that killing people’s wrong.
PRISON GUARD
You know what the Bible says, ‘An eye for an eye’.
SISTER PREJEAN
You know what else the Bible asks for death as a punishment? For adultery, prostitution, homosexuality, trespass upon sacred grounds, profaning a sabbath and contempt to parents.
PRISON GUARD
I ain’t gonna get in no Bible quoting with no nun, ’cause I’m gonna lose.
Dir: Tim Robbins • Scr: Tim Robbins • Based on a book by Helen Prejean • Cast: Susan Sarandon (Sister Helen Prejean), Unknown (Prison Guard)
Director Tim Robbins cast his wife in the Oscar-winning lead role and used his parents, sons and sister in various scenes. His brother David wrote the soundtrack.
1996 SCHIZOPOLIS
In a baffling, dystopian world even the news broadcasts are surreal.
TV NEWSCASTER
A New Mexico woman was named Final Arbiter of Taste and Justice today, ending God’s lengthy search for someone to straighten this country out. Eileen Harriet Palglace will have final say on every known subject, including who should be put to death, what clothes everyone should wear, what movies suck, and whether bald men who grow ponytails should still get laid.
Dir: Steven Soderbergh • Scr: Steven Soderbergh • Cast: Margaret Lawhon (TV Newscaster)
1996 SWINGERS
Trent tries to persuade some girls at a nightclub that his friend is a man to be reckoned with.
TRENT
This is the guy behind the guy behind the guy.
Dir: Doug Liman • Scr: Jon Favreau • Cast: Vince Vaughn (Trent Walker)
1997 DECONSTRUCTING HARRY
Doris despairs of author Harry’s lifestyle and preoccupations.
DORIS
You have no values. With you it’s all nihilism, cynicism, sarcasm, and orgasm.
HARRY
Hey, in France I could run for office with that slogan and win.
Dir: Woody Allen • Scr: Woody Allen • Cast: Caroline Aaron (Doris), Woody Allen (Harry Block)
‘IF MY FILMS DON’T SHOW A PROFIT, I KNOW I’M DOING SOMETHING RIGHT’
Enduringly known for his curmudgeonly New York Jewish wisecracks, his controversial love life and his refusal to attend award ceremonies, Woody Allen (b. 1935) has been writing, acting and directing for six decades and shows little sign of slowing. To date he has won four Oscars, two for Annie Hall (directing and screenplay, 1978) and one each for Hannah and Her Sisters (screenplay, 1987) and Midnight in Paris (screenplay, 2012). Although the hits have been interspersed with less successful endeavours, his inventiveness has rarely wavered and his focus on character ensures his projects attract the biggest screen stars as well as perennial collaborators.
Relying largely on regular producing partners and crew, he keeps his budgets modest and retains the right to ‘final cut’, ensuring his films have a unique authorial voice; even his interviews, stand-up routines and short-story collections carry the familiar Allen stamp.
From Getting Even (1971), a collection of short stories:
• Can we actually ‘know’ the universe? My God, it’s hard enough finding your way around in Chinatown.
• I don’t believe in an afterlife, although I am bringing a change of underwear.
• Eternal nothingness is OK if you’re dressed for it.
• Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.
From Without Feathers (1975), another collection of short stories:
• As the poet said, ‘Only God can make a tree’ — probably because it’s so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.
• Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.
• What a wonderful thing, to be conscious! I wonder what the people in New Jersey do.
• Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.
• It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.
• The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won’t get much sleep.
As a stand-up comic:
• I feel sex is a beautiful thing between two people. Between five, it’s fantastic.
• I was involved in an extremely good example of oral contraception two weeks ago. I asked a girl to go to bed with me, she said ‘no’.
• I was in analysis. I was suicidal. As a matter of fact, I would have killed myself, but I was in analysis with a strict Freudian and if you kill yourself they make you pay for the sessions you miss.
• I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
• When I was kidnapped, my parents snapped into action. They rented out my room.
• Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought — particularly for people who can never remember where they have left things.
From interviews between 1985 and 2011:
• It figures you’ve got to hate yourself if you’ve got any integrity at all.
• If my films make one more person miserable, I’ll feel I have done my job.
• Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.
• My relationship with death remains the same — I’m strongly against it.
• Someone once asked me if my dream was to live on in the hearts of people, and I said I would prefer to live on in my apartment.
• I think universal harmony is a pipe dream and it may be more productive to focus on more modest goals, like a ban on yodelling.
• I do feel that [life] is a grim, painful, nightmarish, meaningless experience, and that the only way that you can be happy is if you tell yourself some lies and deceive yourself.
• The two biggest myths about me are that I’m an intellectual, because I wear these glasses, and that I’m an artist because my films lose money.
• For some reason I’m more appreciated in France than I am back home. The subtitles must be incredibly good.
• I’m not an actor. I can’t play Chekhov, I can’t play Shakespeare or Strindberg. I can do that thing that I do. There’s a few different kinds of things I can act credibly. I can play an intellectual or a low-life.
1997 THE ICE STORM
A disaffected teenager is invited to say grace at supper with her family.
WENDY
Dear Lord, thank you for this Thanksgiving holiday. And for all the material possessions we have and enjoy. And for letting us white people kill all the Indians and steal their tribal lands. And stuff ourselves like pigs, even though children in Asia are being napalmed.
Dir: Ang Lee • Scr: James Schamus • Based on a nov
el by Rick Moody • Cast: Christina Ricci (Wendy Hood)
1999 MAGNOLIA
A police officer tries to balance compassion with justice.
JIMMY
Sometimes people need a little help. Sometimes people need to be forgiven. And sometimes they need to go to jail.
Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson • Scr: Paul Thomas Anderson • Cast: Philip Baker Hall (Jimmy Gator)
2000 TRAFFIC
An Ohio judge appointed as head of the Office of National Drug Control describes his new job.
ROBERT
What’s Washington like? Well, it’s like Calcutta — surrounded by beggars. The only difference is the beggars in Washington wear 1,500-dollar suits and they don’t say please or thank you.
Dir: Steven Soderbergh • Scr: Stephen Gaghan • Cast: Michael Douglas (Robert Wakefield)
On the first day of shooting Sex, Lies, and Videotape Soderbergh’s producers sent him a joking telegram saying he ‘couldn’t direct traffic’, let alone a feature film. Twelve years later he won an Oscar for directing Traffic.
As with telephone numbers in films, which are frequently composed with the structure 555-xxxx to ensure no viewer might dial and achieve a successful connection to a random subscriber, vehicle plates follow a format which means they have no actual bearing on established registrations. One of the characters’ cars has the plate 2GAT123: the same California ID – on different vehicles – also appears in Beverly Hills Cop II, L.A. Story, Go, Pay It Forward, Mulholland Drive, Crazy/Beautiful, Two and a Half Men, and S.W.A.T.
2000 BOILER ROOM
Ambitious stockbroker Jim addresses a new intake of recruits to his company.
JIM
There’s an important phrase that we use here, and I think it’s time that you all learned it. Act as if. You understand what that means? Act as if you are the fucking President of this firm. Act as if you got a nine-inch cock. Okay? Act as if.
Dir: Ben Younger • Scr: Ben Younger • Cast: Ben Affleck (Jim Young)
2001 THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING
GANDALF
One Ring to rule them all,
One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them.
Dir: Peter Jackson • Scr: Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens • Based on a book by J. R. R. Tolkien • Cast: Ian McKellen (Gandalf)
2004 CRASH
A woman crosses the street to avoid two black men in her middle-class neighbourhood.
ANTHONY
Wait, wait, wait. See what that woman just did? You see that? She got colder the minute she saw us. Man, look around you, man. You couldn’t find a whiter, safer or better-lit part of the city right now. But yet this white woman sees two black guys who look like UCLA students strolling down the sidewalk, and her reaction is blind fear? I mean, look at us dawg, are we dressed like gang-bangers? Huh? No. Do we look threatening? No. Fact: If anyone should be scared around here, it’s us! We’re the only two black faces surrounded by a sea of over-caffeinated white people patrolled by the trigger happy LAPD. So you tell me. Why aren’t we scared?
PETER
Because we have guns?
ANTHONY
You could be right.
Dir: Paul Haggis • Scr: Paul Haggis, Robert Moresco • Cast: Chris ‘Ludacris’ Bridges (Anthony), Larenz Tate (Peter Waters)
2005 SYRIANA
An oil executive dismisses warnings that his business practices are illegal.
DANNY
Corruption is our protection. Corruption keeps us safe and warm. Corruption is why you and I are prancing around in here instead of fighting over scraps of meat out in the streets. Corruption is why we win.
Dir: Stephen Gaghan • Scr: Stephen Gaghan • Based on a book by Robert Baer • Cast: Tim Blake Nelson (Danny Dalton)
‘Syriana’ is a term used by US political think tanks to describe their vision of a newly structured Middle East. Writer/director Gaghan did extensive research into the global oil industry before he began work on the script, visiting Washington DC, the French Riviera, Lebanon, Syria and Dubai. He met businessmen, lobbyists, arms dealers and oil traders as well as members of Hezbollah including on one occasion – when he was blindfolded for security reasons – Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah.
2007 THERE WILL BE BLOOD
Plainview explains how he no longer needs to buy Eli’s land because he has already drilled beneath it to steal his oil.
PLAINVIEW
Stop crying, you snivelling ass! Stop your nonsense. You’re just afterbirth, Eli —
ELI
No...
PLAINVIEW
slithering out of your mother’s filth.
ELI
No...
PLAINVIEW
They should have put you in a glass jar on the mantlepiece. Where were you when Paul was suckling at his mother’s teat? Where were you? Who was nursing you, poor Eli? One of Bandy’s sows? That land has been had. Nothing you can do about it. It’s gone. It’s had. You lose.
ELI
If you would just take this lease, Daniel —
Plainview screams like a madman.
PLAINVIEW
Drainage! Drainage, Eli, you boy. Drained dry!
Plainview calms himself.
I’m so sorry. Here, if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw — there it is, that’s a straw, you see? You watching? And my straw reaches acroooooooss the room, and starts to drink your milkshake. I. . . drink. . . your. . . milkshake! I drink it up!
Dir: Paul Thomas Anderson • Scr: Paul Thomas Anderson • Based on a novel by Upton Sinclair • Cast: Daniel Day-Lewis (Daniel Plainview), Paul Dano (Eli Sunday)
Paul Thomas Anderson claimed he watched The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) for inspiration every night while shooting. That film – about gold prospectors in Mexico – was directed by John Huston, on whom Day-Lewis based Plainview’s voice and physical manner.
The Ten Commandments (1956): Hollywood has always been drawn to epic tales, although today’s special effects have made them easier to realize.
Two cinema lobby cards perfectly capture Dustin Hoffman’s dilemma as his girlfriend’s mother tries to seduce him in The Graduate (1967).
Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen face off at the climax of Francis Ford Coppola’s monumental Apocalypse Now (1979).
War
1930 ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT 1930
BÄUMER
You still think it’s beautiful to die for your country. The first bombardment taught us better. When it comes to dying for your country, it’s better not to die at all.
Dir: Lewis Milestone • Scr: George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson, Erich Maria Remarque • Based on a book by Erich Maria Remarque • Cast: Edwin Maxwell (Herr Bäumer)
Germany was still sensitive about her defeat in the First World War and hard-core patriots tried to disrupt screenings by shouting slogans and releasing rats into theatres. When the Nazi party came to power, the film was banned and those who wanted to see it had to take special tours to neighbouring Switzerland and France where it played to full houses.
1942 MRS MINIVER
A vicar laments the parishioners his village has lost to the war.
VICAR
We, in this quiet corner of England, have suffered the loss of friends very dear to us — some close to this church: George West, choir boy; James Bellard, station master and bell ringer and a proud winner, only one hour before his death, of the Belding Cup for his beautiful Miniver rose; and our hearts go out in sympathy to the two families who share the cruel loss of a young girl who was married at this altar only two weeks ago. The homes of many of us have been destroyed, and the lives of young and old have been taken. There is scarcely a household that hasn’t been struck to the heart. And why? Surely you must have asked yourself this question. Why in all conscience should these be the ones to suffer? Children, old people, a young girl at the height of her
loveliness. Why these? Are these our soldiers? Are these our fighters? Why should they be sacrificed? I shall tell you why. Because this is not only a war of soldiers in uniform. It is a war of the people, of all the people, and it must be fought not only on the battlefield, but in the cities and in the villages, in the factories and on the farms, in the home, and in the heart of every man, woman and child who loves freedom. Well, we have buried our dead, but we shall not forget them. Instead they will inspire us with an unbreakable determination to free ourselves and those who come after us from the tyranny and terror that threaten to strike us down. This is the people’s war! It is our war! We are the fighters! Fight it then! Fight it with all that is in us, and may God defend the right.
Dir: William Wyler • Scr: Arthur Wimperis, George Froeschel, James Hilton, Claudine West • Based on a novel by Jan Struther • Cast: Henry Wilcoxon (Vicar)
The wartime film was made at a bleak time for the Allies and director William Wyler repeatedly rewrote this speech, acutely aware of its importance for morale. President Roosevelt recognized its power and the text was the basis for much subsequent propaganda. When Greer Garson won the Oscar for Best Actress, she delivered a speech lasting five and a half minutes, prompting the Academy to impose a forty-five-second time limit thereafter.
1942 TO BE OR NOT TO BE
German Colonel Ehrhardt unwittingly insults actor Josef Tura, who has disguised himself as a Nazi sympathizer.
TURA
Her husband is that great, great Polish actor Josef Tura. You’ve probably heard of him.
COLONEL EHRHARDT
Oh, yes. As a matter of fact I saw him on the stage when I was in Warsaw once before the war.
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