We

Sep 22, 1997 — The English Patient was the ?rst book of Michael Ondaatje’s I had read, and I thought it was remarkable.Two weeks after ?nishing the novel, Anthony Minghella telephoned from London and asked, “How could we do this as a movie?” Being...

Sep 22, 1997 — If one writes a great chapter in a novel, it will seldom be taken out of a book for reasons of time or rhythm. A novel allows you longer arms, a deeper breath. Anthony’s scenes of Kip in England, which...

Sep 22, 1997 — I ?rst read The English Patient in one gulp, sitting in a room on 77th and Columbus the morning after I’d ?nished a sweltering summer of ?lming in New York. When I put the book down, it was dark, and...

Mar 19, 1996 — “[He] loves to set his figures in action against greenish or purplish backgrounds, in which we can glimpse the phosphorescence of decay and sniff the coming storm.”—Charles Baudelaire, writing on Edgar Allan Poe What’s striking about Seven is that the...

Jul 8, 1992 — Since its first screening in 1960, Jean-Luc Godard’s astonishing debut has lost none of its power to thrill an audience or change the way we see the world.

Dec 9, 1991 — We used as much of the actual detail of physical things and of technique as we could possibly cram in, and as many players reflecting the endless variety of character and emotion of the real men as dramatization would allow.

Dec 2, 1991 — Director Akira Kurosawa had wanted to make Throne of Blood for some time. “After finishing Rashomon [in 1950] I wanted to do something with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but just about that time Orson Welles’s version was announced, so I postponed mine.”...

Nov 19, 1989 — After finishing High and Low (1963), director Akira Kurosawa recalls, “I started looking around for something else to do and quite by accident picked up [the novel] Red Beard by Shugoro Yamamoto. At first I thought it would make a...

The writer and director of All We Imagine as Light shares why Sans Soleil and Arabian Nights are gifts that keep on giving, talks about Aki Kaurismäki’s “fun and audacious” Leningrad Cowboys films, and praises Louis Malle’s Phantom India as...

The comedian talks about Andy Griffith’s electric performance in A Face in the Crowd, the depiction of childhood loneliness in Me and You and Everyone We Know, and favorite films such as Bringing Up Baby and Menace II Society.