It’s not just that they’re movies that don’t talk. It’s an entirely different medium. It communicates in a different way. It has nothing to do with movies as we understand them today. But when, say, you show a little kid a Chaplin movie, she won’t care about how it’s different from what she’s used to. She just sees the funny man and the funny gags and it’s fine with her.
MS: Right.
RS: She hasn’t gotten so sophisticated that she realizes, Wait a minute, this is not a movie as I understand it.
MS: She asks, “Will they be talking?” My daughter asks that now, and I say, “The Tramp, the Little Tramp, never spoke. But there will be talking by other people from time to time.” Especially in
Modern Times.
RS: A little in
City Lights.
MS: And she was fine with that.
RS: Getting back to NYU, was it a big surprise to you that there were movements—or moments—like German expressionism in film history?
MS: Yes, but not a complete one. I suspected it because of all the movies I’d seen as a kid, especially when I saw foreignfilms on television, particularly the Italian films. And then I saw
Children of Paradise
in French with subtitles. And other films:
Beauty and the Beast,
for example, was on a great deal in the afternoons.
RS: Forgive me for saying this, butHaig Manoogian sounds kind of like a Jesuitical figure.
MS: Maybe. But I think I may have put that on him. You know, he was Armenian and very, very passionate. He reminded me of the Greeks or, of course, the Italians. I met a lot of Greeks atWashington Square College—Greeks, Jewish kids, and Armenians. It was a great time. It opened my mind completely, and separated me from where I had come from.
I felt really, really comfortable with it. And Haig was tough. He was a very stubborn man. He was really an amazing man. But that’s when it all clicked. Anddon’t forget, by that point I had seen Cassavetes’s film
Shadows.
I realized that films were being made around New York that didn’t depend on the Hollywood studios.
RS: Right.
MS: I would’ve liked to have made a film for a Hollywood studio, but it was all changing. We had
Shadows,
and, as I said,Shirley Clarke making her films, andJonas Mekas. And theavant-garde cinema in general. That opened up a whole lot to me.
Marty at the NYU film school, circa 1963.
RS: Did you go toCinema 16 [the leading film society devoted toindependent cinema at this time]?
MS: I didn’t go to Cinema 16, because right at that time Cinema 16 changed in a way. But every little storefront was showing film. There wasStan van der Beek orHilary Harris, or Ed Emshwiller’s films [all avant-gardists, making non-narrative films].Amos Vogel [a leading theoretician and exponent of avant-garde cinema, and the founder of Cinema 16] would be there, and I became friendly with him, and we would just go see everything. It was an amazing time with cinema, the actual celluloid carrying the image—directly drawing on it or scratching on it, whatever.Stan Brakhage’s pictures, too.
RS: Oh, those are wonderful.
MS: Yes. But I found that for me, I wanted to do narrative cinema—traditional narrative cinema. And so, if anything, I was influenced byItalian films andEnglish films, certainly. And when theNew Wave started in France, you couldn’t help but be influenced by it if you were twenty, twenty-five years old—Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Chabrol, all of them.
RS: But aside from that little technical course you mentioned, NYU didn’t offer—at least in your first years—much in the way of hands-onfilmmaking instruction?
MS: No. But asOrson Welles said, You can learn everything you need to know about a movie camera and a movie studio in about four hours.
RS: I’ve read that often. But, as you know, a lot of mystery surrounds the craft of directing.
MS: Well, what you know is, basically, This is the lens. This is a longer one, this is a shorter one. A shorter one makes it wider. If you get too close with
MS: Right.
RS: She hasn’t gotten so sophisticated that she realizes, Wait a minute, this is not a movie as I understand it.
MS: She asks, “Will they be talking?” My daughter asks that now, and I say, “The Tramp, the Little Tramp, never spoke. But there will be talking by other people from time to time.” Especially in
Modern Times.
RS: A little in
City Lights.
MS: And she was fine with that.
RS: Getting back to NYU, was it a big surprise to you that there were movements—or moments—like German expressionism in film history?
MS: Yes, but not a complete one. I suspected it because of all the movies I’d seen as a kid, especially when I saw foreignfilms on television, particularly the Italian films. And then I saw
Children of Paradise
in French with subtitles. And other films:
Beauty and the Beast,
for example, was on a great deal in the afternoons.
RS: Forgive me for saying this, butHaig Manoogian sounds kind of like a Jesuitical figure.
MS: Maybe. But I think I may have put that on him. You know, he was Armenian and very, very passionate. He reminded me of the Greeks or, of course, the Italians. I met a lot of Greeks atWashington Square College—Greeks, Jewish kids, and Armenians. It was a great time. It opened my mind completely, and separated me from where I had come from.
I felt really, really comfortable with it. And Haig was tough. He was a very stubborn man. He was really an amazing man. But that’s when it all clicked. Anddon’t forget, by that point I had seen Cassavetes’s film
Shadows.
I realized that films were being made around New York that didn’t depend on the Hollywood studios.
RS: Right.
MS: I would’ve liked to have made a film for a Hollywood studio, but it was all changing. We had
Shadows,
and, as I said,Shirley Clarke making her films, andJonas Mekas. And theavant-garde cinema in general. That opened up a whole lot to me.
Marty at the NYU film school, circa 1963.
RS: Did you go toCinema 16 [the leading film society devoted toindependent cinema at this time]?
MS: I didn’t go to Cinema 16, because right at that time Cinema 16 changed in a way. But every little storefront was showing film. There wasStan van der Beek orHilary Harris, or Ed Emshwiller’s films [all avant-gardists, making non-narrative films].Amos Vogel [a leading theoretician and exponent of avant-garde cinema, and the founder of Cinema 16] would be there, and I became friendly with him, and we would just go see everything. It was an amazing time with cinema, the actual celluloid carrying the image—directly drawing on it or scratching on it, whatever.Stan Brakhage’s pictures, too.
RS: Oh, those are wonderful.
MS: Yes. But I found that for me, I wanted to do narrative cinema—traditional narrative cinema. And so, if anything, I was influenced byItalian films andEnglish films, certainly. And when theNew Wave started in France, you couldn’t help but be influenced by it if you were twenty, twenty-five years old—Truffaut, Godard, Rivette, Chabrol, all of them.
RS: But aside from that little technical course you mentioned, NYU didn’t offer—at least in your first years—much in the way of hands-onfilmmaking instruction?
MS: No. But asOrson Welles said, You can learn everything you need to know about a movie camera and a movie studio in about four hours.
RS: I’ve read that often. But, as you know, a lot of mystery surrounds the craft of directing.
MS: Well, what you know is, basically, This is the lens. This is a longer one, this is a shorter one. A shorter one makes it wider. If you get too close with
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