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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Which movie turned you into a film maker

Star Wars opened a rural western kid's (without TV) eyes to the power of movies at age 5
2001, Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket and Blade Runner made me want to make them
The Abyss and Cling Eastwood movies made me want to tell stories about people in tough places
Thousands more made me passionate about it all.
Reading made more of an impact than films though
 
Star Wars ('77) and the Empire Strikes Back got me shooting 8mm.
But it was "The Dark Crystal" that made me want to do it all.
Here's the proof: YouTube link I posted last year of the first video recording I ever made - a complete fanfilm version of TDC. Shot in order since I had no way to edit it at the time. None of my family or friends had a VCR or video camera at the time. So, I convinced my parents to rent a portable VHS video deck and separate camera for 5 days during the spring break of 1984.
 
David Mullen ASC said:
"Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "2001" -- I saw both around the same time, when "2001" first was shown on national TV and then a bit later, when "Close Encounters" was released in 1977, when I was 15.
Click to expand...

I was born in 1977, but "Close Encounters" was the first movie I remember seeing (on VHS more than likely) that I consciously thought to myself, "wow, that was a great movie how do they make those?" I have no clue how old I was, probably around 8 or so.
Ok, so I never did become a film maker, I work in the video world, but that is where the love of movies started for me.
 
When I was about 8 years old, I saw a cut-out animation short on PBS that some kids had made that spoofed "A Trip To The Moon". That got me making Super 8 movies, especially claymation and stop motion with Legos. Then in 1977, I saw Star Wars and was hooked. I continued making short films and eventually studied filmmaking in college.
But the film that blew me away visually and made me want to be a cinematographer was "Days Of Heaven", a desire cemented shortly after when I saw "Koyaanisqatsi".
I continue to be inspired and humbled by great works of cinematography. I still believe it is one of the greatest mediums of expression humans have ever created.
Cheers,
Harry
 
I could mention all kinds of great movies that made me want to tell stories and make art, but the first time I remember wondering how movies were made I was watching The Three Stooges! :)

Probably because it was easy to see their SFX, even at a young age.
 
Succeeding all my childhood through those ones of Ford with John Wayne or TV series Bonanza or yet Leone's Spaghetti Westerns, gangster movies with James Cagney (my favorite actor then and one of mine still today), Bogie or E.G.Robinson (a few of those I had notice to be known as masterpieces of 'Film Noir' years later), shorts with Chaplin-Lloyd-Keaton and Marx Brothers along extra length too, beyond the TV cartoons (I was used to colorize them in my mind from my parents' B&W TV set) as well, Disney and hollywood movies (not exactly blockbusters but as old as possible) during summer time (the only period when I was allowed to go alone to the movie theater) with a weakness for any Spielberg since Raiders of the Lost Ark and european arthouse after the teens...

Europa aka Zentropa (most part shot in B&W also by the hand of Dreyer's DoP Henning Bendtsen, written and directed by Lars von Trier, seen first time almost twenty years ago) had written "period" as the movie that turned me into a moviemaker for last time I checked ;-) since a previous 1990 summer or my 'Viaggio in Italia' with a Super-8 camera in the late 80s (I remember a silly companion of road trying to persuade me to use a flat video camera LOL :-) I was in the law school, before my first graduation, before went to film school...

Some peculiar evènement happened in that Lars von Trier's opening night, at least to me. I was in delay 'cos someone with me that night was delayed for that screening. I didn't want to wait for my partner of route any longer since I had already bought the tickets and seemed to be out of range. When I went down the street towards to the movie theater, the screening hadn't begun yet despite the delay. Phew... I could climb the street again, pick my associate up and when we entered in the movie theater the lights were off in just a few seconds and the film started to roll. The projectionist had arrived with a delay of about half an hour, not usual before nor in the next two decades after, with me or I had ever heard about.

It isn't possible to watch movies in that movie house anymore :-( as far as I could know with the advent of no tickets internet to a university town, last time I've heard from, once I am located now more than 2000 kilometers away even if less than 1500 miles :-)

Same year, Coen brothers' Barton Fink helped to keep the switch on. Or an apparently insignificant short, Mark Rappaport's Postcards, shot on 'rough' video by the way ;-)

As well, so many talks about movies through history of cinema, among them, those in a College free course of Film History and Aesthetics in the local University in those years or a personal one with the filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira about his own feature, O Dia do Desespero.

A couple of years later, an unforgettable portuguese short shot on Super-16 with less than a hour length, Zéfiro (written and directed by my fellow countryman and friend, unfortunately missed José Álvaro Morais) made me to confirm I was in my way home :-)

This does mean the love for the italian masters Antonioni, De Sica, Rossellini, Visconti, Fellini, Pasolini, Leone, Risi, Monicelli, Scola or any Tonino Guerra or yet Cesare Zavattini, Nino Rota or Ennio Morricone, beyond the fact they're not known only as filmmakers ;-) The same for my fellow countryman Carlos Paredes who wrote one of the most beautiful film scores ever seen for Paulo Rocha's Verdes Anos, masterpiece of my former teacher @ Lisbon Film School. Or Zbigniew Preisner. The composer of one of the most important timeless filmmakers: Krzysztof Kieślowski, who I also had the happiness to have personally met in 1994. Or the japanese Ozu-Naruse-Kurosawa or the chinese Wong Kar-wai or Zhang Yimou. Or Abbas Kiarostami or the most recent Nuri Bilge Ceylan without forgetting most of Wenders or a Chabrol or Clouzot or Melville or Tati or Bergman or Dreyer, among many many others such as Welles, Hitch, Nick Ray, Lang or Renoir, of course.
 
The Black Stallion zapped me when I saw it in the theater at the same age as the movie's star Kelley Reno about 8 years old. Connected for me in a very deep fundamental level.
To this day I hope to work on something as powerful and moving as that film at some point in my career.
 
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