crusade to rescue this child prostitute. get me out of here, all right? he seems heroic, but he isn t. the farelessness of that performance. de niro wasn t interested in being sexy or pretty, just being real. and travis is one of the great characters of 20th century film. you talking to me? i remember sitting at his feet and him beginning this phrase, are you talking to me. it s something i worked on. i don t know it just seemed right, the mirror and so on. well, i m the only one here. i saw it happen. i saw him i saw him transform. now, all-day matte goes crayon easy.
we were part of the counterculture. patton was a film about world war ii and connects with the great estrogen ration. but it s also a film about reconsidering war and connects with the vietnam generation. you re just a coward. and it is told with irony by this young screenwriter named francis ford cupla. coppla had his foot in hollywood before that. i was very unhappy during the production because you didn t get the cast. you didn t get to pick the art director. you didn t get to do the final postproduction. out of my frustration, one of highlights of the picture, this skinny kid would come watch what i was doing and became a friend of mine. that was george lucas.
the godfather is unquestionably one of the great movies of all time. its narrative sweep, the beauty with which it s made, the quality of its acting. all of those things are un undenyable. godfather. the film is about power. it s about the succession of power. it s about morality. it s about responsibility. the fact that it s about a mafia family is just the dressing of it. al pacino s character is the youngest son of the godfather. he understands what s going on with his family, and he explains it in cold blooded detail to kay right there. my father made him an offer he couldn t refuse. what was that? he held a gun to his head,
up to catastrophic size. i ll tell you what. so, it opens the door for smaller movies. and when the budget s lower, the artistic freedom tends to be higher. play misty for me. all of a sudden here s a young group of directors that came along and started blowing up the bridges behind them of the way things used to be and now we re trying new ways. let s see if it works. will french connection was about a couple of new york cops doing a hard hustle and busting a bunch of low life drug dealers. billy shot the film like a documentary. he found awe way to make it so real. it really influenced me. my favorite gene hackman performance and pop eye doyle. gene hackman, it was just so filled with anger it just made
effects-laden personal film. there s no one else that could have made that movie but spielberg. i remember as a kid watching close encounters and thinking, i d go. how would you not go? i love the smell of napalm in the morning. it was an extraordinary time. we were all playing off each other, and there was no doubt we were changing things. get them off. there were people conspiring to control events. so you start to see movies that reflect that. did he confirm it? absolutely. it was more about who were the two guys that dug underneath like gophers to get to the truth. i loved blazing saddles because it is such a revolutionary film. it just transported me in ways i had never really quite