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"If you love films and care about filmmakers, you'll have a hard time putting this book down. These lively conversations reveal just how much one generation of filmmakers influences the next - and how a single movie can change the course of a young person's life and career."
-Leonard Maltin, author of Leanord Martin's Movie Guide -
"A great and provocative read. Elder begins with a simple question and leads a wide variety of filmmakers down all sorts of unexpected paths. Why do we respond so passionately, even irrationally, to the movies that change our lives? The wonderful thing about being a critic or a lifelong movie lover is that life changes all the time in relation to the spells being cast on the screen. Elder's book honors that alchemic relationship many times over. It's addictive."
-Michael Phillips, film critic, Chicago Tribune
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Richard Kelly on Brazil:
“It is a documentary film with the brushstrokes of a profoundly mad genius who can create a fantasy world, but he created a fantasy world literally within—he re-created our world in a different visual language. I had never seen that done in any other film. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is maybe the closest approximation, but I think that Brazil certainly said many things that Metropolis couldn’t, maybe because Lang didn’t have the benefit of sound.”
Peter Bogdanovich on Citizen Kane:
“It’s the first modern film: fragmented, not told straight ahead, jumping around. It anticipates everything that’s being done now, and which is thought to be so modern. It’s all become really decadent now, but it was certainly fresh then.”
John Dahl on A Clockwork Orange:
“It had a profound impact on films I did as a student. I made movies with three guys walking around in uniforms beating the crap out of people.”
Henry Jaglom on 8½:
“For me, the ultimate image is: He’s that young boy in a white band uniform, leading all the characters in his life on this circular parade. He’s got in the background, this meaningless space station think that he’s never going to make. The young boy is just leading all the characters in his life. He’s just showing us who he is, and how it happened.”