David Larsen talks to career film buff David Thomson about his revised classic.
Pauline Kael being dead, a conversation with David Thomson is about as scary as it gets for anyone interested in film. Who is Pauline Kael? Go look her up.
The thing you want to look her up in, if you possibly can, is The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, which Thomson has been writing and revising since 1975.
It was never meant to exist, it's 1000 densely printed pages long in the newly released fifth edition, and its title, as Thomson is the first to concede, is misleading.
"There's no way to retitle it now, it would be absurd as a marketing thing," he says. "It isn't really an accurate title for the book I don't think, but I don't know what else to call it. I was originally commissioned to write a sort of encyclopedia of film, about half the length of what I ended up with. It was going to be a book that had entries on people, but it would also have had entries on countries, entries on technical terms, things like that.
"And I started writing the pieces on people and I got so excited and carried away that about halfway through the project I said to the publisher, 'look, I haven't got to any of the other things yet, I'm still doing people'. But I think I've found a way of writing about the people that no one's really tried before, where you look at their whole career as an arc, and you make quite strong critical comments on them but you supply a lot of factual information too. And the publisher looked at it and said, 'I like it, follow it' - which was a wonderfully kind thing."
It was a wonderfully smart thing. Thomson is a film buff's film buff, and he has a sinuous style, which allows him to compress a great deal of argument into a minimum of words. The biographical dictionary lives up to its title well enough to be both biographical and a dictionary. Its alphabetical listings of actors, writers, directors, and significant others (like Kael, probably the most influential critic of film's first century) provide dates, facts, film titles, all the obvious stuff.
But the book's real appeal, and the thing the title can't convey, is that it's also an all-in brawl. Thomson's assessments of films and their creators are toothy, monumentally well informed, and unexpected. Here he is on Charlie Chaplin: "Was Chaplin so far from Hitler? He spoke to disappointment, brutalised feelings, and failure and saw that through movies he could concoct a daydream world in which the tramp thrives and in which his whole ethos of self-pity is vindicated."
This is provocative, but chew on it. There are less startling but equally well turned comments on every page. Again and again, Thomson delivers assessments like this one, which sums up the looks, charisma and career choices of the actor Aaron Eckhart (Thank You For Smoking, The Dark Knight) in eight simple words: "He could pass as Robert Redford's Mr Hyde."
Or this, on Anthony Hopkins: "There's not another actor around better equipped to take on large, eccentric characters ... Hopkins will be big in a picture, whatever you give him. Answer: make sure the part and the challenge are big."
Typically, a quick delve into the book turns into a lengthy ramble, which leads to a lengthy wrestle, as the entry you were after on Ang Lee triggers thoughts of Kate Winslet, whose entry leads you to Jane Campion, and so to Sam Neill ("what a wry, watchful actor he is. If you doubt his considerable intelligence, then track down The Cinema of Unease, the documentary he wrote and edited on the history of movies [and himself] in New Zealand."), until you find your head full of opinions you need to go off and digest. Sometimes at length. Thomson has been thinking hard about film for most of his 70-odd years.
"My first solid memory of the movies - actually there are two from around the same time, I don't know which came first. One was the Olivier Henry V, which I was taken to by my parents, because it was deemed a kind of patriotic duty to see it in England at that time, and the other one was a Lassie film, where Lassie was being pursued by the Gestapo. And what I remember is that I was so moved by both films, not that I understood them obviously, but I was so moved that I was in tears and had to be taken out of the theatre."
In fact this used to happen to him rather often. "I remember my father explaining to me how projection worked, and I didn't believe it. I really thought it was happening up there. And of course therefore became terribly caught up."
So he would burst into tears, and be taken out, and then demand to go back in. "I loved the movies. And my passion for them was very clear very early, and I think everyone in my family got the idea that if you wanted to keep him occupied, take him to a movie. So I was taken a lot, as a very young child. I lived in south London, there were a lot of cinemas very close, I could walk to them all.
"And within a few years I would wait outside a film, not really knowing what the film was, but if it had an A certificate, which meant that if you were under 14 you had to have an adult with you, I would ask strangers to take me in. Which they did. And my mother knew this was happening, and it was regarded as totally safe at that time. Probably today you would be up in the courts if you let your kid do that. I can remember a group of old ladies who would take me in quite often, and they'd take me out for ice cream afterwards. It was a very civilised proceeding."
Passion became vocation. Thomson gave up a place at Oxford to go to what was then Britain's only film school, intent on becoming a director. He was younger than most of his class, and far less experienced. "Everyone in the group was so much more technically proficient than I was. They could use a camera, they could edit, they could record sound. But the one thing I had was, I could think of a story to film, and they couldn't. I became the screenwriter of the group."
As he began to realise how difficult it was to make headway in the film world, he gradually slipped over into writing books, many of them film-related.
"But I've worked on films over the years, usually as a screen writer. I like the company of film-makers very much, and it's been enormously important to me to have a sense of how the business operates. An awful lot of critics say things about film that misunderstand the process. The difficulty that went into it, the compromises you have to make. Every film has a different story of how it got made, or mismade, and I'm very interested in those things, those angles on films."
The first edition of the dictionary came out in 1975, by which time Thomson was lecturing on film at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. "The book is probably two-thirds as long again now. This edition we're talking about is the fifth, and maybe if I'm lucky there'll be a sixth, but I can't believe it'll go beyond that."
He says this partly because a seventh edition would require him to be writing like a dervish in his middle 80s, but also because it isn't obvious to him that film as we now know it will still exist in a decade's time. "If you look at the numbers of people who go to the movies - once upon a time in America it was in the region of 60 per cent of the population going once a week. It's about 15 to 20 now. Now you can say, yes, but so many more people are watching video and television and a lot of the time when you are watching television you are watching a movie-like thing'.
"That's true. "But the communal theatrical experience, the feeling of going out to a packed theatre, which was very common in my childhood - that doesn't happen so much any more. Economically the theatrical business is a more and more far-fetched thing. I suspect that there's going to be a big lurch soon, and most of our film-going is going to be done at home, one way or another. And there will be some film museums, there will be sort of art gallery-type cinemas that are preserved, often on university campuses.
"But I think that a lot of what look like commercial theatres now are probably going to fold in the next ten years. I think that increasingly film is going to become something that we are looking at on the small screen, and a lot of the qualities of the big screen are just going to fade away."
New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Little, Brown $90)
