Sunday, May 19, 2013

Favorite quote from Olivier Assayas


Favorite quotes from Olivier Assayas in Filmcomment magazine, March-April 2013, on the film THE DEVIL, PROBABLY (1977, Robert Bresson, A+30):

 

“I had a difficult reaction to it, and it’s fairly obvious, because my situation was like yours. I had the utmost respect for Bresson, but this one, my God…I had no idea what it was about. It seemed wrong. Because it was 1977, and I was into punk rock, and the energy around me was so far away from anything this film depicted. It was all about stuff we were rejecting, which we did not want to deal with anymore, it was the old world. When I looked at the film again away from that context, five or 10 years later, I realized that it was the best depiction of what the Seventies were about. To anybody who was in France at that time it’s obvious, and it’s extraordinary that it was an old man who cracked it. When I saw the film again, it just struck me so cruelly that what I was rejecting was not the movie, it was myself, the person I had been at the time. Because the characters in the film, specifically the central character, are really the closest to whatever I was at that age that I’ve seen in a film. But at the time I did not want to see that! In the end, it must be one of my favorite films of all time.”

 

Reading what Assayas said, I wonder which film best represents your personal youth in the 1980s. Is it included in the list below?

 

1.THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1985, John Hughes)

 

2.BU SU (1987, Jun Ichikawa, A+30)

 

3.CLASS ENEMY (1983, Peter Stein, West Germany, A+30)

 

4.DEADLY FRIEND (1986, Wes Craven, A+15)

 

5.HEATHERS (1988, Michael Lehmann, A+)

 

6.PRETTY IN PINK (1986, Howard Deutch, A+15)

 

7.THE SOUND AND THE FURY (1987, Jean-Claude Brisseau, A+30)

 

8.TWO OF US (1988, Roger Tonge, UK, A+15)

 

9.TYPHOON CLUB (1985, Shinji Sômai, A+30)

 

10.VICTIMS (1987, Chana Kraprayoon, A+30)


 

As for my own personal youth in the 1980s, I think BU SU and THE SOUND AND THE FURY are the films that best represent it.




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