This is fantastic.
Um, you know...
it's such
a great opportunity
to talk to a filmmaker that
I've always admired so much.
I always said when I grew up
I wanted to be you.
And now, even today I say, "When
I grow up, I want to be you."
[Laughs]
'Cause I want to keep
that energy and that passion
for movies,
and you just shoot
back to back to back, you know?
And you've got
such incredible taste
that just allows you to go
from one film to another.
Yeah. The plan is
that there is no plan.
Yeah, exactly.
And you mentioned when we were
talking before we sat down here
about George Orwell
and all that.
Sure.
And that reminded me
of your...
really famous
award-winning "1984"...
With Steve Jobs.
Yeah, the -- Yeah,
the Apple commercial
with the girl
with the hammer...
Yeah.
...and how that,
first of all,
revolutionized
what a TV advert could be.
Sure.
But it's just a beautiful
little, you know, short film.
Well, you know,
the courage of an agency.
The Chiat/Day were brand-new,
hadn't got an account.
They had this account.
Mm-hmm.
They came to me. I was very big
as a commercial maker.
And they gave me
one sheet saying,
"Look, this is the thing."
I said, "Well, Apple?
This is the Beatles."
He said, "No, no, no, no.
Not the Beatles.
This is a guy
called Steve Jobs."
"What does he make?"
He says, "Computers."
I said, "For what?
Household computers?
What, to write
the shopping list?
What are you talking
about?"
[Laughs]
How wrong I am.
And I said, "You know,
how much does it cost?"
He said, "$2,500."
I said, "Are you kidding?
It's too expensive."
[Laughs]
But I like it. It's fun because
you never show the product,
and all you, at the end,
say is "We're gonna show you,"
relying on the fact that
people know what "1984" was.
Yeah.
Surprising how many people
didn't know what it was.
It wouldn't work today because
too many science fiction fans
only know their science fiction
from movies and television
and their pop culture
references,
video games and so on.
Um, they don't know it
from the literary route.
Or they don't read.
We are today's novelists,
if you like,
because the evolution of the
film, in effect, is a book.
Yeah. Yeah.
And they vary in how good they
are to how ordinary they are.
That's the way it goes
in literature as well.
Mm-hmm.
So I'm hoping that we are
replacing the book,
but it's a lazy way
of getting information,
'cause
you're sitting there.
You're not having to do this --
smell the page
and, you know,
look at the cover.
Yeah.
You're just being fed
information.
Is that good or bad?
I don't know.
Well, you have literary roots
to a number of your films.
Yes.
Like, "Blade Runner" comes
from a Philip K. Dick novel,
"Do Androids Dream
of Electric Sheep?"
Yeah.
Which most people
don't remember.
The book is very -- 19 stories
in the first 20 pages.
Yeah, exactly.
He was all over the place.
And one of the problems
is you've got to select
that central story,
which Hampton did --
Fancher did.
Yeah.
And then off that --
I met Dick,
who said had read
that I said off the side --
and you got to be careful
what you say --
I said, "Geez, I couldn't get
through the book."
He was furious,
so to make amends,
I invited him
to EEG one morning --
Doug Trumbull's place.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
"Listen, come and look
at a couple of shots."
So I showed him
the opening of the movie.
Yeah.
And he was
absolutely blown away
and was quelled.
Good. Good.
I'm glad you made amends.
Became pretty friendly.
I'm glad you made amends.
And then, in my mind,
what completed that package,
that experiential package
for me as an audience member,
was just your pure cinema
layered on top of that.
Mm-hmm.
You put us into that --
that world.
You felt the grit. You felt
the rain in the streets.
You felt the crowding.
You know, all of that comes from
just life and living,
'cause I'd done
a lot of commercials
before any film --
a lot.
And in that time,
it would take me to Hong Kong
prior to the first skyscraper
ever being built in Hong Kong.
So I was working in the harbor
on junks in the harbor.
There'd be 1,000 junks.
And the -- the Bank of Hong Kong
was just about to be built,
so Hong Kong was a massive,
medieval situation.
It was
unbelievably stunning.
And they'd just discovered
polystyrene.
So everything
went out the window,
so the harbor was a floating
collection of polystyrene.
Yeah.
And it was the future.
That was dystopia.
Yeah.
