about horror. it s about dread. from the very first frame, something grabs your solar plexus and pulls on it. nobody uses silence like stanley kubrick. mom! it was as if i had been in the overlook hotel for two and a half hours. he creates a pacing where it overtakes the way you re breathing and the way you re existing, and you re in there. in all kubrick films, he controls you. kubrick s steady cam work in the shining broke new ground. the steady cam gave stanley a chance to put us in a scene that didn t have any time constraints. you get so hypnotized being behind that tricycle. you don t even see his face. you re behind it, which leads to one of the scariest shots in the movie.
i just want to say goodbye. all the kids had fallen in love with e.t., and i like to think e.t. had fallen in love with all of them. and that goodbye scene was genuine. those tears were real. be good. yes. steven spielberg movies they re big blockbusters, but they are personal stories. they are small stories told against a giant canvas. they re here. with the 1980s, i really felt that i was speaking to myself, loving escapism. poltergeist was about all the things that scared me. i had a tree out my window as a kid, used to scare the [bleep] hell out of me. so what happens in poltergeist? the tree comes into the house and grabs the kid. i made stories about kids on one final adventure as the goonies and discover the riches that save their parents homes. suburban stories about gremlins running around and tearing things up.
so he has a hit man kill her. martin landau realized it, like, i had woman killed and i thought i was gonna go to hell and nothing happened. whereas woody is constantly getting, you know, shit on by life, and he s just doing the right thing. you look very deep in thought. i was plotting the perfect murder. his writing is very wrong for strong for that reason. it always feels like he was thinking about some philosophical truths about human nature and says, oh, i want to write a movie about that. and i m talking about reality. i mean, if you want a happy ending, you should go see a hollywood movie. you realize, of course, that we could never be friends. why not? what i m saying is and this not a come-on in any way, shape or form is that men and women can t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way. nora ephron wrote when harry
hans gruber is one of the key movie performances of the 80s because of the idea that the villain could be intellectual. it wasn t a beefy villain who beat up our hero, but was a guy who our hero had to out-think. a lot of action stars think it s cool to show no fear. to me, that s not a courageous person. that s a stupid person. the courageous person is the one who has fear and goes through it anyway. oh, john, what the [bleep] are you doing? it isn t the size of the fireball, it s how much you care about the person running from the fireball.
In the 1980s, stars like Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep and Eddie Murphy explode on the screen; aliens, time travelers, ghosts and road warriors share the cineplex.