Alex Schwartz: Welcome to Critics At Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Alex Schwartz.
Naomi Fry: I'm Nomi Fry.
Vinson Cunningham: And I'm Vincent Cunningham. Now, each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. How you guys doing?
Alex Schwartz: Doing great.
Naomi Fry: Doing good. Well,
Vinson Cunningham: the dog days of August.
Naomi Fry: The dog days.
Vinson Cunningham: That's right. Sorry. Uh, it's been extremely fun to hear you two interviewing some of our illustrious colleagues this month. We've had Eric Lach, we've had Lauren Collins. I mean, it's been fun. Oh, it's been fantastic. What a run. Yeah. And now it's my turn. Today I'm talking to none other. Then Richard Brody.
Alex Schwartz: Hells yes, yes, yes. My guy. The man, the legend. 
Naomi Fry: The The beard.
Vinson Cunningham: The beard coming down from the mountain. I wanted to talk to Richard because he is, yes, a cherished colleague and friend, but he also happens to be one of my very favorite writers and critics. Like ever. He teaches me something every time I read his work.
He has incredible opinions that really get the people going, and most importantly, he writes like a dream. Today we're talking about a lasting point of interest with Richard, the figure of the auteur from the French new Wave to a 24, and we're gonna talk about what Auteurism did for mid 20th century art house cinema and how those ripple effects are showing up today in the works of filmmakers.
Spike Lee. And I also wanna know how Richard feels about the criticisms of art tour theory that have emerged over the decades, including, I should say, in our very own magazine. The big question I have is what the future holds for the singular artist with a burning vision? So that's today on critics at large Auteur theory.
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Richard, it is so good to have you here. Thank you for coming on, critic so large. I can't tell you what an honor it's to have you here, 
Richard Brody: Vincent. It's an honor to be here and it's a great pleasure to see you. I've been looking forward to this for a while. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. So we are gonna talk today about something that I know is important to your formation as a critic, but also as a.
Lover of cinema, which is auteur theory. Um, and I, I think the reason to do this is not so much to put forth like an educational sort of manifesto, but to really, if, if I could think of an alternate title for this, it would be just how to watch a movie. Just looking at a method of enjoyment, I guess, first of all, before we even get into it, is that how you.
Receive au tourism as an idea, as a way to sort of, um, focus your attention and your enjoyment of the movies? 
Richard Brody: Well, it's how I receive it personally, but I think it also connects, um, essentially with the very history of the idea. I mean, the very peculiarity of what we're talking about today is the, uh, is the fact that we're using the French word for author to describe good directors.
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Richard Brody: And the question of why we do so gets to the very. Notion of what we're looking for in a movie. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: The reason we're here is that a bunch of young French critics in the late forties and 1950s had this idea, but even more they had this experience mm-hmm. Of movies and the experience of movies that they were having was a sort of immediate communication with the.
Omnipresent, but completely invisible. Director. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Richard Brody: And the reason why they had this connection, whether they were watching an obvious art house type movie, like films by Hobel Baron mm-hmm. Or Carl Theodore Dryer, or watching Hollywood movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock or Howard Hawks and Nicholas Ray, is that they themselves.
Were not actually critics. They were masquerading as critics. They were all future filmmakers, right? They wanted to be filmmakers. They were thinking like filmmakers, and they connected with filmmakers. They had this experience of an artist present there. they essentially were saying, these are our people. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. These, 
Richard Brody: these are the people whom we want to emulate. And what was controversial about it? Was not that they praised directors as artists. That was a longstanding practice and criticism going back to the 1910s.
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Richard Brody: What was novel was the idea of seeing Hollywood directors working within an ultra commercial, ultra controlling system as the artistic equals of. Filmmakers working in more forgiving systems and what's more discerning through the conventions, through the commercial constraints, the full power of their artistry.
Yeah. 
Vinson Cunningham: Now who are we talking about? Who, what are some of the names that are sort of most important in this, this moment in, as you say, criticism and. Proto filmmaking? 
Richard Brody: Well, the Hollywood filmmakers they, um, took to most strongly were Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. Mm-hmm. So much so that when they started writing in the newly founded Cadu Cinema, which was born in 1951, they got the nickname of the Hitchcock Hawkson.
Vinson Cunningham: And who were the critics? 
Richard Brody: Oh, and the critics, well the critics are Jean-Luc Godard mm-hmm. Was born in 1930, Francois Trouffaut, born in 1932. Um, Jacques Crivette, who was a couple of years older. Claude Chabrol, who was around the same age. Mm-hmm. And Eric Rohmer, who was born in 1920. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. It's so interesting because as you say, we're using the French word auteur, but so much of it, there's this kind of transatlantic motion because they're looking at America, the, the Hollywood movie, uh, in specific and at a certain moment.
Their insights make it back to America. How does that bouncing that transatlantic copping of ideas occur, do you think? 
Richard Brody: Well, it occurs problematically, um, you know, you, you opened the discussion by talking about the O theory.
Um, they didn't call it the theory, they called it the politic de mm-hmm. Policy, but also. Politics. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: One of the reasons for their passion for movies, for wanting to be filmmakers and seeing movies, um, creatively, is that Paris is France's. Hollywood, France, New York, and France, Washington dc In other words, it's the, it is the cultural capital.
Yeah, it is the movie capital and it's the political capital. It sounds like a 
Vinson Cunningham: nightmare. 
Richard Brody: And there's very much of a political, an actual, you know, electoral political component to the passion for movies that these critics had, because there was a great protectionist strain in France at the time. Mm-hmm.
Great anti-Americanism both left and right, and they said no. What matters is the. The politics. Our politics is art, 
Vinson Cunningham: right? 
Richard Brody: There are two reasons for this. Idea's migration to the United States. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: One is the prime reason why this idea has caught on around the world, which is these future filmmakers became actual filmmakers.
Right? So they validated the power of the ideas and the authenticity of their experience. By the films that they made, principally the first feature by Truo, the 400 Blows. Mm-hmm. And the first feature by Godar, which was breathless. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Richard Brody: And in so doing, they sort of set out the Alpha and Omega of first films, right.
Truo a personal story of his own childhood godar. The adaptation of an American genre. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yes. 
Richard Brody: The gangster film. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Richard Brody: So in effect, what they gave America and the world was A permanent floating film school. In other words, you wanna be a filmmaker, your school is the movie theater.
Vinson Cunningham: Right. You kind of put forward two ideas that I think have everything to do with even how we watch movies today, which is on the one hand, the personal and on the other hand. Genre, which is also another way, you know, we talk about the Western and its constant applications to American life. today. Right. How genre is a vehicle for the personal, how did they understand genre as a sort of. A place where a, a filmmaker could imprint his or her own vision. 
Richard Brody: They understood it, paradoxically, and that paradox continues to divide the world of movies to this very day.
Mm-hmm. The paradox was the baby and the bathwater. The baby is the director, Uhhuh and the bathwater is the industry of Hollywood. 
Vinson Cunningham: Right, 
Richard Brody: right So, When Gha made breathless, he said, you know, he believed he was telling a realistic story, and only later and not that much later. Mm-hmm. Came to realize that he had, in effect made what he described as Alice in Wonderland, that the Hollywood genres that he received were not images of the world, they were images.
Of Hollywood itself. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Richard Brody: And what has happened in the course of the years is that in embracing the babies 
Vinson Cunningham: of 
Richard Brody: Hollywood. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Richard Brody: Future filmmakers and future critics have swallowed a whole lot of bath water. In other words, they, the, the, the genre has become not merely seen as a constraint, but seen as a kind of virtuous, sort of essential matter of filmmaking.
Wrongly. 
Vinson Cunningham: Well, could we dig into breathless a little bit to, and talk about, you know, what it does along the lines that you've set forward. 
Richard Brody: Sure. You know, we're gonna be talking a lot more about Breathless later this year, and Richard Linklater's film, nouv Vevo comes out because that's essentially a biopic about the making of breathless.
Vinson Cunningham: Right, right, right. 
Richard Brody: Um, so breathless is a crime story. Michel pka is a petty thief who steals a car. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: Kills a police officer, drives from the south of France up to Paris, reconnects with his American girlfriend, and realizes he's being pursued by the police. 
Vinson Cunningham: Right. 
        CLIP - BREATHLESS
Richard Brody: That's the story. It's based on an actual crime in Paris in the early fifties.
Vinson Cunningham: and the genre trappings of the film. According to the sort of that really funny image you put forward, is that a wink toward Hollywood bathwater? Is that saying filmmakers have always been sort of, um, constrained by glued to this kind of genre direct, and the art has been in circumnavigating that.
Richard Brody: He didn't see it as dreck on the contrary. That's, that's, that's kind of the, the strange part that, you know, he and his cohort believed what they saw. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: They believed in the Hollywood conventions as refracted, but authentic representations of what was going on. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: As ways of acceding to forms of experience that, uh, a non genre would leave.
In low relief, they were high relief ways of bringing out certain facets of, of the world. Mm-hmm. Of American society. Um, the problem was that Godda was filming in French society, 
Vinson Cunningham: but a French society that had been informed in some way by looking at American entertainment 
Richard Brody: in some way, but they didn't think of this as entertainment. They thought of this as art. Right. In other words, They essentially thought they were watching Faulkner.
you know, godda in 1952 refers in a piece to, you know, the greatest American artist, Howard Hawks. He didn't say the greatest American filmmaker, Howard Hawks. In other words, they thought of, you know, Hitchcock and Hawkes and Nicholas Ray and Preminger as the equivalent of. The great writers of the day, the great painters of the day, the great composers of the day.
He was like 
Vinson Cunningham: Hawks or Richard Wright I, this kind of thing. Exactly. And that's 
Richard Brody: another one of the peculiarities involved in the formation of the UR idea or the namely, the exaltation of what most people considered, you know, mere commercial art, mere entertainment as the great art of the day. 
Vinson Cunningham: Right. 
Richard Brody: So when Godda was working in the gangster form, he kind of thought he was dostoevsky in a certain way with crime and punishment.
Sure. It was not, you know, not literally. But he thought that by using genre, he was doing the same thing that, you know, the great writers, not just the great filmmakers were doing. What happened is that he realized pretty quickly the radical gap between genre conventions and the world as depicted in genre conventions.
And his own experience, his own observations. Mm-hmm. 
Vinson Cunningham: Right. 
Richard Brody: Didn't mean that he jettisoned genre, it meant that when he relied on it, he put it through the intense scrutiny of his own critical filter. Yeah. In filmmaking 
Vinson Cunningham: in a minute, how the Tic de tour evolved as it crossed the Atlantic, uh, French did not cross the Atlantic.
To me. This is critics at large from the New Yorker.
:: MIDROLL 1 :: 
I wanna move us toward how this apprehension of movie making has sort of continued to ramify. But I don't think we can do that without talking about a figure who I know is important to you, which is Andrew Cs I was thinking of. A corollary to Andrew CREs and my, um, understanding of art in other forms.
Who I was left with was Lee Strasberg, the, uh, famous teacher of acting who came into contact with, uh, the, the acting instructor, director Stanislavsky and his methods, and imported them to America. And in so doing, uh, founded or helped to found what we think of as method acting. Um, CS was a fan and reader of.
Kaia, the, the people that we've talked about and translated their ideas, and he's the one who called it auteur theory in America. How did this method, how did this idea. First made contact in America, what was the effect of this kind of translation? By Sarah's, 
Richard Brody: I very much like your comparison of CST Strasberg, by the way.
'cause my, 'cause the, the comparison I had been using until you said that was Julia Child 
Vinson Cunningham: French cooking. Exactly. Oh yeah. Fair enough. I I, I like cooking too. They were cooking, 
Richard Brody: um, 
Vinson Cunningham: every sense of that word. 
Richard Brody: So Saras is a fascinating guy. He, um. He went to France and imbibed, um, the films along with the criticism but CS did something peculiar. Cs exactly as you said, called it the OT theory.
Yes. Now, for the French, it wasn't a theory. In other words, there was nothing to. Prove it inspired them as filmmakers, 
Vinson Cunningham: right. 
Richard Brody: It was their practice. It was their guiding light, but it wasn't, it wasn't an 
Vinson Cunningham: orthodoxy that was imprinted upon every text they encountered or something like that. 
Richard Brody: Exactly. And Sarah's did something that was simultaneously heroic and ultimately a little reckless because he had such enthusiasm for so many.
Interesting American filmmakers, he created a sort of massive taxonomy, you know, is he right to be interested in John M Stall? Absolutely. Mm-hmm. Is he right to be interested in Bud er? Absolutely. But. The best way to do that is to do it essentially freely as a critic, rather than to look at filmography and attempt to, you know, organize and canonize.
Yeah. And assume that this theory is something that can be demonstrated empirically. Mm-hmm. By way of analysis, 
Vinson Cunningham: perhaps this is the American, sort of Anglo-Saxon mind meeting a more poetic French sensibility. Exactly. Not to, not to totally stereotype, but No, 
Richard Brody: exactly. And of course the problem was that Sarah's.
Who was a genius of a critic was still. Not thinking like a filmmaker. He was thinking like a critic. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: And he put an enormous target on the theory. And Pauline Kale shot very effectively at it. Pauline Kale, who was of course not at the time writing for the New Yorker, she was a long time freelancer.
She didn't land the New Yorker until she was, uh, nearly 50. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Richard Brody: Pauline Kell had her own critical orientation, which was formed by her years of watching. Movies, especially Hollywood movies in the 1930s when the studios were at their very peak of control over directors. Mm-hmm. Her idea of movies involved, the popular movies that she enjoyed when she was young.
The popularity that they enjoyed was part of their artistic virtue. 
Vinson Cunningham: Right. You could call her an early, the, the term did not exist, but you could call her an early poptimist.
Richard Brody: Exactly. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: So she, you know, she never denied that directors were important in the making of films. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: Um, but. She saw some particular artistic virtue attaching to the very fact of popularity and the ambition of popularity. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: And what she certainly didn't like was the idea of canonizing films on the basis of essentially prejudice in favor of a particular director over another on the basis of their previous films.
Vinson Cunningham: Right. 
Richard Brody: Um, she also appreciated the idea of a well-made film in general. In other words, her, her praise went to professionalism overall. Mm-hmm. 
Vinson Cunningham: You know, 
Richard Brody: the studio production with its producer intervening at every step of the process and shaping the script and having test screenings and having other directors come into reshoot scenes to make the film work better for commercial release.
You know, to her, that was not an industrial imposition on. The directorial, um, prerogative. It was how you made a movie good. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Richard Brody: So because of this orientation, she was to begin with, um, hostile to the very idea of looking, let's say, past or beyond the film to the personality of the director that's expressed in it. So when CS was praising a. These films with some fairly rigid theoretical structure.
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Richard Brody: She rightly in the name of the empirical fact of, you know, viewing experience targeted it and her debate tactics were really unfair. They were, she simply distorted the argument for the sake of making, should say, 
Vinson Cunningham: this is largely. Takes place in a famous essay called Circles and Squares. Am I right? Is this the, exactly the, the, the piece that you're referencing? 
Richard Brody: That's the piece published in the relatively obscure film quarterly. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: And it was extremely effective. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. Tell, I'm sorry I cut you off though. You un extremely unfair. What were the methods you mentioned? Oh, 
Richard Brody: oh, for instance, um, she, you know, she said these, you know, these critics are all essentially overgrown adolescents who, um, are looking to juice their masculinity by sitting in Times Square, Grindhouse, getting off on, you know, tough guy movies and.
Well, did they like tough guy movies? Sure. But they also liked musicals. They also liked, you know, movies by Douglas Cir that were explicitly in the genre of women's pictures. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Richard Brody: and their interest went far beyond Hollywood to films by, you know, Kenji, Misa, Gucci  max Ois to Jack Ti, you know, they, they loved films of all sorts. They were not saying that, you know, these tough guy films, these that we're watching in Times Square are the only kind of good movies there are. It was a kind of movie that they were bringing up. Critically and culturally to the level of movies that everybody recognized as great.
Vinson Cunningham: Right. 
Richard Brody: They discerned that. In fact, many of these films that were received by their public as commercial trash was actually the work of artists whose inspiration was discernible throughout. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah.  you mentioned earlier on that the, the Kaia crowd felt and acknowledged this intangible invisible presence that of.
The director, it seems to me that today the, the invisible figure that we hear from notice the most is maybe an inversion of the sort of move from old Hollywood to the moment that you're describing, which is like the studio has kind of reimposed itself as the sort of invisible figure. I'm thinking of course about whatever you think of, superhero movies, Marvel movies, um, it seems like the director is again, in many.
Commercial situations. Again, a sort of worker for hire to deliver a vision that is not their own. First of all, do I have that right? And if I do, is that a problem that you think is, I don't know, worsening? Loosening. 
Richard Brody: The studios and the producers were never really gone. Mm-hmm. You know, there was a blissful moment, which wasn't really that blissful in the 1970s. Late sixties, early seventies, when the studios were having, forgive me for going, like for rewinding, but were having great no economic crises.
Hollywood was really out of touch. Yeah. And so they basically handed the keys to the kingdom through a group of young filmmakers. And so you had this great outpouring of, you know, very interesting films in the seventies, whether by, you know, Martin of Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Michael Chimino, so on and so forth.
Elaine May, um, there were lots of really interesting films being made in the seventies. Then came jaws. And then came Star Wars and Blockbuster Fever and the studios realized, Hey, our gold mine involves control again. Mm-hmm. We figured out the formula and the studios have never really been out of control.
Um, and. You can see this in, you know, the great sort of the next great crisis in Hollywood, which came in the 1990s, early, early two thousands, when big budget movies were simply not really making much money. The big budget realistic movies or what the people loved to celebrate as the, you know, the mid-range drama for adults.
Mm-hmm. For the simple reason that they. Already seeing this sort of quote film on television in the first big wave of Prestige tv. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: So in the like late nineties, early two thousands, the studios basically got out of that business, but there was still a business to be. Had, and it was independent producers, but at a relatively high level of investment.
People like, um, Megan Ellison, bill Pollad. Mm-hmm. Um, Steven Rails, who now works with Wes Anderson, independent producers, saw that there was a business to be made with the best Hollywood directors. That essentially for a younger generation of viewers. The director was the product. Right. In other words, auteurism had long taken over.
Everybody you know, has loved Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Truo. Well, some people didn't love Michael Truo, but, 
Vinson Cunningham: and was that a, by the way, was that a response from the filmmakers to these critical. Battles that were raging behind. We talked a lot about CS and Kale, but did filmmakers themselves take this on self-consciously as a project to say, no, no, no.
I can make a film that is more personal and as this being an inheritance of these earlier figures that we've discussed the Scorsese of the world? 
Richard Brody: Well, they did at the point that it became an option. Right. In other words, independent filmmaking is, you know, kind of. Always existed in one way or another.
Um, high level, like Charlie Chaplin who owned his own studio. Right, right, right. Or, you know, lower budget like Oscar Micho, who was an independent, known his own studio. Um, but. It was only when filmmakers realized they had other options that they took them. Mm-hmm. In other words, it wasn't fun for Wes Anderson or Martin Scorsese to fight with the studios.
Scorsese, when I interviewed him last year, he told me that he was so unhappy with his fights with the studio that he actually was going to leave filmmaking. He was going to stop making films. Right. It was only access to. Independent financing where the producers were not going to be overbearing and were going to let him essentially make the film as he wanted to make it.
That brought him back. Wolf of Wall Street. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Richard Brody: Um, one of the great outpourings of, you know, directorial creativity. Um, so these filmmakers, whether older like Scorsese or um, or younger, like, you know, Wes Anderson or Sophia Coppola all had another option, and that option was they would work with lower budgets.
Mm-hmm. But it wasn't so much the movie that was the product. They were the product. 
Vinson Cunningham: Right, right, right. In other words, 
Richard Brody: the fact of their name recognition had value to a generation of film goers. Right, who had been brought up on Scorsese and Coppola and De Palmer and so forth. I mean, now, for instance, the last decade of Spike Lee's great artistry is a direct result of his working with producers who have allowed him the artistic freedom.
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Richard Brody: I interviewed him about this actually about a decade ago. 
Vinson Cunningham: And was he saying this because what you're describing sounds on the one hand, like, you know, uh, a, a great body of work can earn you on some level freedom, artistic freedom, and also it's like a kind of, the other way to say it might be a contemporary patronage system or something like that.
So was spikes, was he saying this as gratefully or was it sort of like a recognition of how tenuous that position is? 
Richard Brody: So around. 11 years ago, you know, spike Lee had made, um, the sweet Blood of Jesus. Mm-hmm. His remake of Ganja and Hess. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Richard Brody: With Kickstarter money, I remember that he had made, he had made what I consider one of his best films, um, red Hook Summer with his own money.
Vinson Cunningham: Right. 
Richard Brody: So what I wanted to know, when I went out to Fort Green to see Spike Lee, my reason for going out to interview him was I wanted to know why he was not working. With independent producers. The way that, you know, Wes Anderson was, or Martin Scorsese was. Mm-hmm. Or Sophia Koola was, and he told me what he thought, and this is, you know, this is in print.
Yeah. He told me, because they think I'm the angry black man, you know. He said, I wanna know the same thing. Where is my independent producer? Fortunately they showed up. Amazon showed up for Shirac. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Richard Brody: Which is a great film. And since then he's been working with many independent financiers, which is to say streaming services are independent financiers.
Vinson Cunningham: Right. 
Richard Brody: They are producers who don't essentially need to maximize box office return. They need to maximize attention. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: And the name of Spike Lee is as it should be valuable.
Vinson Cunningham: Filmmaking today looks a lot different than it did even 20 years ago. So how does the auteur figure in now, and where does movie making go from here? That's in a minute. On critics at large from the New Yorker.
:: MIDROLL 2 :: 
So Richard, one of, I mean, To even presume to have a favorite piece of yours would be like, impossible for me. But I do have an idea of yours that I've been thinking about for a very long time. It's from a piece, it's called A Great Film, reveals itself in five minutes, which I totally believe and I believe it about most works of art. I thought about this piece. As I wrote my book, like every page, I was like, okay, how do I suffuse this page with like Cunningham ness such that if somebody opened it up to page a hundred, they could get what this whole thing is about.
Um, but uh, what you said in that piece, I'm just gonna quote you to you, which I know is a mortification for any writer. So I'll try to keep it quick. You said, um, reading a few pages of any really good book should astound and delight and send a reader to the beginning to devour the book whole. synecdoche. Is the fundamental experience of art, the sense that a random fragment contains a lifetime of experience and suggests the depth of a soul.
That's because this is the fundamental experience of life. No one knows anyone completely. No one comes in at the start, but the person you see for an instant and can no longer live without and whom you can imagine, spending a lifetime getting to know is pretty much what makes life worth living. First of all, beautiful sentiment.
Um, and also. I wanted to talk about this because number one, I think it's helpful for anybody in terms of how to enjoy a movie that it can be a matter of moments and images and sounds that you can enjoy something based on the sort of irregular eruptions of, of beauty that don't have to be sort of big holism, but not to be grandiose, but how did that insight come to you and how does it govern the way you look at films?
Richard Brody: embarrassingly, I don't know where this exper off the top of my head. I don't know where this experience came from. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody:  I guess it came from just going to the movies. Mm-hmm. Realizing very quickly when I was in the hands of an artist, when an artist was taking possession of me. Yeah. And realizing that that was happening really.
Pretty quickly. 
Vinson Cunningham: Right. 
Richard Brody: That didn't mean that there, that when that didn't happen, there wouldn't be interesting and enjoyable thing things happening throughout the film, but that, that, that kind of sparked that there was a huge gap mm-hmm. In my experience between an enjoyable movie and the movie that I considered to be, you know, the expression of a director's.
Higher inspirations. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Richard Brody: That is what came to me and to this day, comes to me pretty quickly when I'm watching a movie. You know, this is one of the points of contention between CS and Kale. Mm-hmm. You know, kale, you know, lashed into CS for praising a relatively minor film by Raul Walsh from 1935 because of one particular fantasy sequence or dream sequence, I can't remember what, and she said, you know, wouldn't you rather just watch a movie that in its entirety is good?
To which the answer is well. Sure you would, but what happened? But what happens if you happen to know that a writer has written a piece of, you know, relatively commercial junk to pay the bills, but there's this spectacular sentence or this spectacular page in the middle of the book that could change your life.
Vinson Cunningham: You gotta get it right. 
Richard Brody: So that's essentially the argument. It's not that you know every film by, you know, Raul Walsh, Howard Hawks, or Jean Godar. Is great. It isn't. But because these people are artists working at a very high order of creation, they may create something in an uncongenial context. Right.
That will be overwhelming. 
Vinson Cunningham: That is a beautiful expression. Uh, thank you. I wanna talk to you now, uh, about one such moment. In a film that I know that both of us have seen the new Spike Lee movie, highest to Lowest. Mm-hmm. The moment that I knew that I was gonna like this movie, it came so fast and I was like, actually there's no way that I won't like this.
Uh, there is a, a beautiful camera panorama of, uh, New York. As seen from downtown Brooklyn and what is this sort of glittering view? Almost literally the song is playing off of, um, little moments of glass, and as this is happening, the most unlikely song is playing. It's, oh, what A beautiful morning from Oklahoma.
        CLIP - “Oh What a Beautiful Morning” (Highest 2 Lowest soundtrack)
And all of a sudden the, the humor and the odd tension and the melodrama of that, uh, was so amazing to me that I just, I loved it. I'd love to hear you talk about not only that moment, but your review of that film, which I think has so much to do with what we talked about. Before, 
Richard Brody: um, I felt the exact same way about the, the beginning of that film.
I, I had the exact same experience Yeah. That it started. And I said to myself, you know, this is amazing for exactly the reasons you just described. Um, style is a funny thing in movies. Mm-hmm. Um, if it's any good, it's not inseparable from substance. It is substance. You know, the, the way that Spike Lee Films Brooklyn in.
Do the right thing. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: Is not an adornment. It's a vision of the world. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yes. It's too hot. Everybody's too close. Everything's too loud. Yes. Something is bound to break. 
Richard Brody: Exactly. There are a lot of people around who are not in the foreground of the action, but there's something going on. The colors are too bright.
Yes. The images are too tense. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: There's a sort of framing tension, editing, tension, you know, it feels like a time of crisis. Yeah. Crisis. And at the same time, a celebration of something that he deeply loves and knows is besieged.
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: A way of life, a community. Highest lowest is doing something very similar. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: To an altogether different end. In other words, the elegance, the gloss of the world as he depicts it in highest to lowest is the world as seen through the eyes of a rich and powerful man. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: It's doing it in images, it's doing it in.
You know, the, the way the camera moves, it's doing it in Denzel Washington's magnificent performance. I think this is one of his great performances. I think it's, you know, it's 
Vinson Cunningham: magnificent hairline, too 
Richard Brody: magnificent hair. Um, I, I envy him. 
Vinson Cunningham: Um, we should, we should say Highest to Lowest is a remake of the classic film by Akira Awa High and Low.
And it is about a very. Rich man, as you say, played by Denzel Washington, who was a record executive. He's sort of about to execute a corporate. Maneuver, uh, sort of leveraging his wealth to buy back the company that he built. And at this moment of sort of extreme aspiration for him, he learns or thinks that he learns that his son is being kidnapped.
In fact, it is the son of his, um, driver and friend played by the great Jeffrey Wright. And what unfolds after this is sort of a police procedural action movie. Uh, morality Tale, which in the case of Lee's film is really about what a man, as you mentioned, like, uh, David King, this record executive owes to younger and socioeconomically opposite black people.
Richard Brody: Yes. Although I would add that, uh, what, what it shows the protagonist owing young. Black artists in the black community, um, turns out to be fairly ironic. Mm-hmm. Which is to say he owes it a legacy. 
Vinson Cunningham: Right. 
Richard Brody: And that's not exactly the point of view that this character started his career with. 
Vinson Cunningham: And this I think is where an attention to the.
Again, indistinguishable, uh, sort of mark or style of an artist is inescapable. It it, you can't watch this movie without thinking about Spike Lee himself. 
Richard Brody: Exactly. And stylistically there's a tension in this movie between, let's say, modernism and classicism. I mean, spike Lee is simultaneously both. One of the things that I love about Spike Lee's films, one of the things that has brought me to Spike Lee's films from the very beginning is.
That the text is the subtext, right? In other words, he's not a director who works with hints and nudges what he wants to say, he says out front, but it reaches very deep because he, he elaborates on it. He varies it. He does something with his main ideas throughout the film. Yes. So if they come out seeming really transformed in this movie, it's all out front too.
But where he gets with it is really surprising and. His direction is simultaneously modernist and classicist simultaneously calling attention to itself 
Vinson Cunningham: mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: And appearing transparently realistic. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. 
Richard Brody: Um, the tension between a realistic depiction of the world and the world as it appears to the protagonist and to Spike Lee through his own transformative vision is almost tearing this film apart 
Vinson Cunningham: right now.
As we talk about this, um, these methods of construction and ways of making and how they come together in this film, and Lee himself, I do wanna also reintroduce the figure of the studio. Of course, highest to Lois is produced by A 24 and Apple TV Plus, and it has what I think is a regrettably short theatrical run.
And then we'll stream on Apple TV. Plus, I wanted to ask you, 'cause we talked about this a little bit before. Whether, um, there are things that are possible in this movie that were not possible in the previous sort of crowdfunded, independently produced era that you mentioned of Red Hook Summer, for instance, does the commerce aspect of this, does the method of, or the means of production.
Show itself in this film, um, and sort of create a contrast to other moments in his filmography or life as an artist? 
Richard Brody: Well, in a way, the means of production is a subject of the film. Yeah. David King is a producer after all. Yeah. And Spike Lee has had his own production company since, you know, since before he had a career, since, you know, 1979.
Yeah. If I'm not mistaken. Um, so you know, the idea of. Being a producer of being, let's say, tapped into the business. And the economics of filmmaking, along with the art of filmmaking, has always been at the center of his vision. Mm-hmm. And I think that that's an accurate, well, first of all, it works for him, most importantly.
Right. But I think it's in general, an accurate vision of what it is to be a great director. In other words, in the studio system, a director essentially was slotted into a production. But most of the great filmmakers are also. Untitled great producers. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: Not because they're necessarily literally finding the money or raising the money, but because they're creating their own method.
And that's what it is to be a director, isn't simply to say, this is the shot. You know, godda created his own methods for making breathless, and they were singular methods. That's one of the reasons why we're gonna be watching a movie soon about those methods in, in Linklater's film. Vogue. Yeah, and Spike Lee has his own way of doing things.
One of the things about being a filmmaker is that when you're working for a traditional Hollywood studio that is gonna be releasing a movie, that the movie's fairly expensive and you'd be releasing it on many, many screens, you need to. Please a wide audience. Um, there are both constraints imposed on the methods and constraints imposed on the results, and that certainly never stopped Spike Lee from making great films, but.
It did get in the way at certain points in his career. You know, there's a combination for, for Spike Lee as for most studio filmmakers of, you know, extreme tension with producers and the sense that at the very least from that pressure you get.
Big budgets mm-hmm. To do grand elaborate things. In a movie like, you know, red Hook Summer, spike Lee, working with a very small budget could not do things at the scale that he does them in highest lowest. 
Vinson Cunningham: Yeah. Um, first of all, uh, spike Lee is also in his beautifully artful way, also very uns subtle about this arrangement.
There's a moment where, um, David King knocks on a door, I guess we won't say which, and the apartment number is a 24. Yes. Um, do you think that this collaboration between Lee and a 24 and Apple TV plus is indicative or suggestive of a way forward for the cinema artist, the auteur? Does it point a way forward?
Richard Brody: The way forward is wherever, you know. As Spike Lee says, by any means necessary, the generation of independent producers has crystallized, in effect into mini studios companies like A24, Neon, and Mubi. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: Which marshal the resources of studios but act like independent producers in promoting the work of filmmakers with names.
They don't only make films by filmmakers with names, but that's one of their showcase activities. 
Vinson Cunningham: Right. 
Richard Brody: And the artistic importance of that practice depends on the artistic importance of the filmmakers whose names they consider worthy of exalting. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: You know, in the mid 1950s, Andrea bza the. One of the co-founders of KA cinema and a great critic who was not down with the politic de uhhuh, wrote an article critical of it, in which he concludes essentially Ur Yes, but of what?
In other words, it isn't the mere fact of identifiability. Of distinctiveness of having a directorial personality. Right. That makes a director good. 
Vinson Cunningham: Mm-hmm. 
Richard Brody: We have today. I don't wanna name names, I don't wanna be nasty, but there are a lot of filmmakers whose names are recognized, right? And who are considered, they certainly are distinctive.
In other words, you would watch their films and say, oh yes, this is a, you 
Vinson Cunningham: recognize 
Richard Brody: it. Blank film in both senses of the word. Forgive me, I'm, 
Vinson Cunningham: yeah. Polite and shady at the same time is exactly what I'm asking for from you. Please continue. 
Richard Brody: And yet, the films themselves, the aesthetic is not in fact something that I might find inspiring or exciting.
Mm-hmm. Um. If it pays the bills, great. If it, if it finances the films of other filmmakers who really are great or finances the careers of filmmakers who are just getting started and turn out to be great, you know, it's a noble venture. Why not? You know, that's what it is to produce films, you know, it's a, it's a business and in order to keep the lights on and in order to be able to consider, continue investing significant sums in, in movies, you know, they have to do business, 
Vinson Cunningham: right?
Richard Brody: Um, but. You know, the UR business, so to speak, is not simply, you know, hearts and flowers. It's not only a steady string of great movies, 
Vinson Cunningham: right? 
Richard Brody: It's also movies of, you know, you could say, not auteur, but promoteur
Vinson Cunningham: forgive me. Well, that's 
Richard Brody: not my original joke either. No. 
Vinson Cunningham: Well, um, whatever business you're in, whatever business we are a part of, I am glad, truly glad.
That it has produced a Richard Brody. I'm so grateful that you did this, 
Richard Brody: Vincent. This has been a great pleasure. We could go on for a long time. We 
Vinson Cunningham: could. I, I, it's, it's hard to find a place to stop, but until next time. Yeah. Take care. Thank you. Thanks, Richard.
This has been Critics at Large. This week's episode was produced by Michelle O'Brien. Alex Barish is our consulting editor. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Conde Nast's. Head of Global Audio is Chris Bannon. Alexis Quadra composed our theme music and we had engineering help today from Michael Jenno with Mixing by Mike Kuman.
You can find every episode of Critics at large at New yorker.com/critics. Now, we'll be back the regular deal, all three of us on the Thursday after Labor Day. Till then, enjoy the last bit of your summers. We'll see you in September.