Since 1992, John Boorman and Walter Donohue’s Projections series has been a highly enjoyable forum for actors, directors, writers and critics to discuss the process of turning money into light.
This, the fourteenth instalment, purports to round up the best articles from the previous annuals. It is certainly an eclectic mix and covers at least one aspect or another of cinema from the studio system up to iMovie. A quick reordering of chapters sweeps the reader from a misty-eyed interview with James Stewart to Tony Curtis in conversation with daughter Jamie Lee to a brief but fatiguing peek into Boorman collaborator Lee Marvin’s Pacific War diaries. The ’60s and ’70s are covered by Eastwood’s journey from contract player to independent movie star, script-writer Robert Towne revisiting ‘Chinatown’ and Scorsese trotting out his ‘on De Niro’ spiel.
As with any greatest hits, there are going to be a couple you’ll skip. For every piece as lyrical and insightful as Wong Kar-Wai cameraman Christopher Doyle’s diary of finding the visual keys to his director’s roaming vehicles, we get a lumpen 50-page (an eighth of the book!) interview with Aardman Animation’s Nick Park.
Enjoying ‘Apocalypse Now’ sound designer and editor Walter Murch’s essay on the relationship between sound and image from womb to multiplex is of course no guarantee that you’ll get close to finishing Willem Dafoe’s actorly chat with Frances McDormand about being true to character, or risk Viggo Mortensen’s unasked-for poetry. Or vice versa.
In his introduction Boorman asks: ‘Is the computer eating movies from within, sucking out their humanity?’, only for this selection to contain no discussion of the subject. A closing chapter spent with Jonathan Cauoette about making his autobiographical film ‘Tarnation’ independently and largely on his PC is perhaps an indication of where Projections, after this book-end, might be heading.
