Musical Interlude

I can't listen to music with vocals while I'm writing. I guess the words bit of my brain is wired like a one-way radio and can only do traffic in or out. This week I've been leaning heavily on Hans Zimmer's scores for Inception and The Thin Red Line, which are both films in my all time top-something (I'd be more specific, but I'd only have to change it later).



Brilliant, but also ominous and brooding. So for a break yesterday I put on Zimmer's bouyant, shy love track from True Romance, You're So Cool.



And that reminded me of the best bit in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the unexpectedly emotional visit to the Art Institute Of Chicago. Moments of reflection and sadness are something that more recent zeitgeisty teen movies seem to have forgotten how to do. Or maybe with Barry Levinson and John Hughes the '80s was some kind of high watermark. Either way, this is one of my favourite scenes of forever.



The music is a cover of The Smiths' Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want by The Dream Academy. The original was used in Pretty In Pink, which John Hughes had made right before Ferris Bueller - the Art Institute scene had initially used a different track, and had come after the parade sequence in the movie, but it tested poorly until it was re-jigged and re-scored.

Location

Over the last year I've done two locations-based features for the Total Film website. The idea came from the site's editor Andy Lowe, and involves choosing a location from a film, then tracking it down in google maps and doing a side-by-side image comparison with a still from the film. When it goes right, the result is a really satsifying visual snap.

The first feature was built from a range of movies - famous locations and, for ease's sake, things I had in my DVD collection for screengrabbing. The second was timed to coincide with the 2010 London Film Festival, and features locations only from films shot in the capital.

They're really, really good fun to write, but take up a huge amount of time - I've spent hours virtually walking up and down streets looking for a particular doorway or underpass. And, because trawling around finding locations is inherently interesting, I often get sidetracked or end up finding more than one location per film.

More than anything it emphasised to me what an incredible piece of technology google streetview is. I'd find visual markers in a particular location - the flats behind Powders in My Beautiful Laundrette, for instance - and zoom, shift sideways, adjust the angle and explore the image. It's the Esper Machine, but real, and it's got the whole goddam world in it.

I'd like to do something more complicated than a straightforward comparison gallery if I get the chance. One thing I couldn't include in the feature was how with certain locations it's possible to move the 'camera' in google maps to mimic shots and seqeunces in films. So, here in King's Cross, you can pull the image of the St Pancras clocktower to the right to reveal Harry Palmer's office, as in the start of Billion Dollar Brain, moving from this:



to this:



Try it...


There are loads of other extended bits and pieces you could use it for - tours around a particular film, or movement within a scene. If I ever get time I may put some up here.

Nothing will come of nothing

A few days ago I re-watched Minority Report for the first time since I saw it at the cinema on release, and enjoyed it far more than I expected. The virtual touchscreen imagery has only become more compelling thanks to smartphone touchscreens (I'm assuming the Kinect controls for Sky Player on Xbox 360 will come with fingerless cyber-gloves and tortured memories of lost children) and I loved the icy visual look, the relentless plotting, and the fact that it's sci-fi done very well, which is pretty rare.

The viewing also reminded me of something else I'd thought at the time, having then recently read Truffaut's Hitchcock book, a series of interviews with Hitchcock conducted by the French director. My favourite part has always been when Hitchcock describes a scene he thought up for North By Northwest.

It occurred to me that we were moving in a northwesterly direction from New York, and one of the stops on the way was Detroit, where they make Ford automobiles. Have you ever seen an assembly line? They're absolutely fantastic. Anyway, I wanted to have a long dialogue scene between Cary Grant and one of the factory workers as they walk along the assembly line. They might, for instance, be talking about one of the foremen. Behind them a car is being assembled, piece by piece. Finally, the car they've seen being put together from a simple nut and bolt is complete, with gas and oil, and all ready to drive off the line. The two men look at it and say, "Isn't it wonderful?!" Then they open the door to the car and out drops a corpse!

Truffaut loves the idea, and calls it "a perfect example of nothing", but Hitchcock couldn't fit it into the film. But there's a scene in Minority Report which recalls the idea in a pretty direct if inverse way.



It's still about impossibility, of course, but featuring Tom Cruise it's about a different kind - it's about stars and presence, rather than suspense and absence.

Was it deliberate? I hope so. There was another discussion about Hitchcock's influence on Spielberg recently, with Dreamworks sued over the similarities between 2007's Disturbia and the short story behind Rear Window. Hitch would probably have given him this one for free.