Literate Comments

1 This is a book I’ve read several times over many years—an inspiration to me in its frankness. Elia Kazan doesn’t spare himself. After he directed his first feature, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” he returned to New York: “I sat alone in my room in the Royalton Hotel . . . ,” he writes, “and thought how worthless my life was. . . . It was just another movie. . . . It was mushy. . . . The whole thing was poverty all cleaned up.” His confessions are those of a man who is both humble and arrogant: “I am a mediocre director except when a play or film touches a part of my life’s experiences.” From his apprenticeship as a shy jack-of-all-trades with the Group Theatre in the 1930s to his emergence in the 1940s and ’50s as the leading director of Broadway plays, including “Death of a Salesman” and “A Streetcar Named Desire,” he went on to direct some of the best American films: “On the Waterfront,” “East of Eden,” “A Face in the Crowd.” His odyssey reads like an epic of the 20th century itself.

Hitchcock

By François Truffaut (1967)

2 The reader is a fly on the wall in these absorbing dialogues between two great filmmakers. Hitchcock was the master not only of suspense but of all aspects of filmmaking. Like Kazan, he is remarkably self-critical, describing his own anxieties and fears as they affected the subtext of his films. From his Jesuit education, he had developed a “fear of being involved in anything evil,” as well as a physical fear of being punished by the loss of his freedom at the hands of the police. He explains his methods in detail and also reveals the origin of “the MacGuffin,” his term for a plot device that leads the audience down the wrong path until he’s ready to uncover his true intentions. Hitchcock and Truffaut exchange anecdotes with clarity and simplicity, qualities they both valued most as filmmakers.

This Is Orson Welles

By Orson Welles and
Peter Bogdanovich (1992)

3 Orson Welles claimed that 75% of the quotations attributed to him were false. But Peter Bogdanovich is a respected film historian and critic as well as a fine director. (Full disclosure: He and I had a production company for a brief period with Francis Coppola.) His lively conversations with Welles in various parts of the world took place over a nine-year period in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Welles reflects on “Citizen Kane” at length: “In the original script we had a scene based on a notorious thing Hearst had done. . . . And I cut it out because I thought it hurt the film and wasn’t in keeping with Kane’s character. If I’d kept it in, I would have had no trouble from Hearst. He wouldn’t have dared admit it was him.” Also included is a valuable analysis of “The Magnificent Ambersons” and the scenes that were cut from Welles’s original version. Welles was trying to make a new film in Rio when “Ambersons” was previewed in Pomona and Pasadena, Calif. Many in the audience ridiculed the picture, and RKO decided to cut it without Welles’s participation. It broke his heart for the rest of his life. “What’s left is only the first six reels,” he tells Bogdanovich, “My whole third act is lost because of all the hysterical tinkering that went on. And it was hysterical. Everybody they could find was cutting it.”

Making Movies

By Sidney Lumet (1996)

4 Sidney Lumet calls directing “the best job in the world,” and I don’t disagree. His book is a warm-hearted memoir as well as a tutorial. If you want to direct a film, I guarantee that this book will reveal how it’s done. Lumet excels at the use of all the tools, from camera to sound, from screenplay to the cutting room, and he worked with many of the best actors of his generation—Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Katharine Hepburn. He directed 45 films in 50 years. All are skillful and entertaining, many are enduring classics: “12 Angry Men,” “The Verdict,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Network.” He offers numerous insights into his techniques. In “Prince of the City,” he never framed a shot so that the sky was visible. “The sky meant freedom.” But his main character, Danny, a police informant, had no way out. “The only shot that had a sky in the frame was practically nothing but sky,” Lumet tells us. Danny climbs up a catwalk overlooking subway rails as he contemplates suicide, his only possible freedom. But he insists that all technique should derive from the material and should stay hidden.

Searching for John Ford

By Joseph McBride (2001)

5 The title is suggestive of the film that’s considered Ford’s best, “The Searchers.” Joseph McBride goes in search of the great director’s life, from his Irish ancestry in County Galway to his birthplace on the coast of Maine. After getting kicked out of college, Ford went to work for his brother Frank, already an established director in the early days of Hollywood. By the time he became a director in 1916, he had worked at every job you could do on a film, from prop man to stunt man. McBride dispels a lot of myths. The public image that Ford cultivated was that of a “mean tough guy,” but he is described by Olive Carey, an actress who worked in many of his films, as “darling and warm.” Frank Baker, a character actor who worked with him for many years, said: “The John Ford we know is a . . . living legend who was created by John Ford himself, to protect . . . the sympathetic, sentimental, soft John Ford.” Ford’s films idealized family values and celebrated American virtue and morality, but he was a distant father to his two children and had frequent extramarital affairs. McBride has written the definitive work on Ford’s inner life—a respectful but critical study of a complex man, the most “American” of filmmakers.

A version of this article appeared May 11, 2013, on page C12 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: William Friedkin.