Leah, I highly suggest you read Kubrick: Interviews. Kubrick goes on and on about the topics of his films and shows how truly brilliant and well educated he is.
I read that Vincenzo Natali checked all that math himself for Cube. Prime factors just boggle my mind. I… don’t even know where to begin.
EDIT: Oops. Googled it. Apparently they hired a man with a PhD in statistics to handle the math.
Oh well.
cf: Towne, Robert. Chinatown, 1974
cf: Chayevsky, Paddy. Network, 1976
cf: Rohmer, Eric. My Night at Maud’s, 1969
Atom Egoyan and his myriad of ideas and references in The Adjuster are mind-blowing…I had to watch it with Egoyan’s commentary just to make sense of it all.
Moderated
Although on paper it doesnt seem smart, but i think MEMENTO. The concept and the structure is highly intelligent
The film Primer with it’s shoe string budget was a well constructed script.
Michael Haneke, specifically Cache and Funny Games.
@Chris Sepesy –
Chayevsky was a notoriously good & thorough study, in doing research: see also Ken Russell’s Altered States, which is chock-full of medical jargon. (Chayevsky pulled his name off the film due to fighting on the set. Evidently Russell caught wind of the writer directing Blair Brown behind his back, and booted him. Chayevsky also wrote a novelization of his script, which I remember reading as a kid – probably the only such movie novelization of note, Clarke’s 2001 aside…)
You want to talk about book smarts? How about Paul Verhoeven’s doctorate in math and physics from the University of Leiden?
The greatest intellectual working in film is the least conspicuously-intellectual filmmaker around: Terrence Malick: Harvard grad, Rhodes scholar, studied under Stanley Cavell and Gilbert Ryle, translated Heidegger…and yet, when you look at The Thin Red Line and The New World, he seems the greatest intuitive filmmaker working…
Are you asking about autodidacts, specifically? Michael Haneke studied philosophy at university, among other subjects. Though he came to filmmaking later in his life, he had already worked as a film critic and in theater. He is no autodidact. Woody Allen, though having attended university, admits to not having been the most dedicated student. But he has read widely and thought deeply about subjects such as philosophy and psychology. No surprise then that he would eventually create Crimes And Misdemeanors and other films where he is at his best, which display his talent for subtlety, satire and complexity of thought. I guess in film, Kubrick is the ultimate autodidact. There are others.
Joel Coen majored in Philosophy at Princeton
Terrence Malick went to Harvard then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar then taught at MIT for some odd years.
I forgot about Joel Coen – Barton Fink is a pop meditation on the mind-body problem…
Ethan was the philosophy grad. Malick’s professor Stanley Cavell remembers Malick being the quiet type. But when he did say something it was worth hearing.
Heavy Book smarts .
-Eisenstein’s The Film Sense and The Film Form.
I always see Barton Fink as an exploration of the ideas in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Witkacy. The Apollonian (the Hollywood system, Hollywood in general) and Dionysian (John Goodman’s character and actions) forces in Barton’s life are what allow him to create his art. Barton even says as much at one point: something to the effect of “all great art is born out of suffering.”
Flemmon, but what about Charlie Meadows, and “I’ll show you the life of the mind!”?
I agree. I definitely think that there is a reading of Barton Fink in line with the mind/body problem. I just tend to favor a reading along the lines of the creative process a la Nietzsche’s BofT.
Nice notes there Flemmon, I used to be a big Nietzsche fan but had never put it together with Barton Fink which I find to be one of the only Coen Brothers works worthy of the praise it receives. You’ve spurred me to revisit this little film with new eyes.
I hope this doesn’t mean the whole canon has to be revisited from this standpoint. I don’t think I could take Hudsucker again…
Nice Topic. Aronofsky always seems to infuse his screenplays with his sort of geeky fetishes/obsessions and find fresh and creative twists to them. If you scan over his films you can find these tidbits throughout.
Second the Kubrick Shout, if you read over his interviews his realm of knowledge really was staggering. He immersed himself into every single aspect of his films thematically and technically. He was also under constant challenge by the interviewer in almost every one. Completely different then the cupcake interviews filmmakers are normally subjected to these days. During each interview it was more of a debate, with every argument or rebuttle of his both logical and precise. In contemporary cinema we really don’t have an analytical mind on that level imo.
Another director/writer to add to the discussion is Charlie Kaufman. Every film is uniquely his own style, yet layered in philosophical and psychological ideas.
The way Kaufman embeds philosophical or psychological so deeply that they’re never overt or didactic reminds me a lot of the playwright Eugène Ionesco, and also the Polish playwright/novelist/painter Stanisław Witkiewicz, a.k.a. “Witkacy”..maybe even of the Polish emigré novelist Witold Gombrowicz…It’s interesting that Ionesco and Witkacy haven’t been adapted to any significance in cinema (Gombrowicz has had a few 21st century adaptations in Poland, including Skolimowski’s film of Ferdydurke, which I haven’t seen.)
Frankly, I have never seen a movie that made me question the writer’s ability to write it. Screenwriters and writer-directors, especially, wield a certain form of respect from me for churning out pages and pages of characters, dialogue and settings. Even Tarantino, who is not by any means the favourite director here, earns my respect for consistently producing fun screenplays with colourful characters.
Ingmar Bergman tends to delve into the religion category, not as man with organized education on the subject but as the son of a pastor. Each film he writes is his way of answering a question about god or life to himself, he uses his scripts as escapes from these thoughts, and I believe that no one else could write the movies that he does.
Marcello, if you are looking for reasons to revisit The Hudsucker Proxy I’ll try this…again Nietzsche. Think eternal recurrence and amor fati. It really is all about that circle. I strongly believe that the Coen bros have Nietzsche written all over their work.
leah
Okay so here is the deal. I just finished watching Darren Aronofsky’s Pi for the first time and all I could think of when I was done was how the hell is he did he know enough about numbers to write this screenplay? I mean he went to Harvard and all, but still…wow. So that got me thinking, there are many filmmakers who were terrible students and are not exactly advocates for formal education. So I guess what I’m getting at is I love a great storyteller, but what are some other films that you don’t think anyone else would be smart enough to write? That is, considering we can only write from what we already know…