The Hollywood Reporter recently gathered Mel Gibson, Denzel Washington, Oliver Stone, Barry Jenkins, Damien Chazelle, and Mira Nair for a directors roundtable interview. Here are some of the highlights:
Where and when did you first fall in love with film?
Mira Nai: "Under a mosquito net in East India, where I grew up. We had a foster grandfather-type who used to shoot man-eating tigers, and he took us to the only cinema that existed in this little town — and they showed only one film every Sunday morning, and that was Doctor Zhivago. So the contrast of Siberia with Omar Sharif and the heat of tropical India was palpable and memorable and made me want to tell stories."
Denzel Washington: "Same story. (Laughter.) But it was Creature From the Black Lagoon because I grew up in the Boys & Girls Club, and for whatever reason, that was the only film they got, so we watched it over and over. The creature from the black lagoon — he'd come out of there with the bad makeup and the stuff hanging off …"
Oliver Stone: "It scared the shit out of me."
Washington: "It scared you? All that stuff hanging off?"
Stone: "That was in the nuclear age, when it started, and everybody was thinking about extraterrestrials coming to Earth in some form or another and killing us all."
Washington: "I didn't grow up a film [lover]. My father was a minister, so The Ten Commandments and King of Kings was it. That's all we saw. And we went to church. I didn't go to movies, wasn't interested in movies. I started acting in the theater, at Fordham University, and we were snobs and thought we'd make $650 on Broadway one day. But I started [seeing] Taxi Driver, Mean Streets, Straight Time, Marathon Man — [movies that starred] anybody with an "O" — Pacino, De Niro, Hoffman-o. I didn't see anybody who looked like me, so I didn't aspire to act in movies, but I liked those New York movies."
Was there ever a moment when you fell out of love with film?
Stone: "Sure, several times. It's tough. It's a long haul, and you go through a lot of defeat. There's a lot of setbacks. We have some successes here and there, but it always seems like there are more failures than successes."
Gibson: "It's like going to battle. You feel like you're a general and you have troops, and sometimes it's a good gang and sometimes there's a few of them lacking and they leave you hanging out to dry. There are many frustrations."
Stone: "Every film makes you reassess where you are on the evolutionary scale."
Washington: "I had a defeat, and I said, "You know what? I'm out." It wasn't healthy, to be honest with you. And I didn't plan on being a director. Someone gave me a script and forced me to do it. I remember talking with Philippe [Rousselot], the cinematographer, and I was like, "Where do you put the camera?" This is long before we were shooting. He said, "Well, you put it in front." (Laughter.) I thought there was some magic formula. It was a lot of fear when I first directed."
Mel, how have your past personal issues affected your approach to your work?
Gibson: "My God, any experience you have in life enriches your work somehow, good or bad. I developed a lot of things when I had some time off. It was the off-season, you might say. (Laughter.) It's just so good to be able to come back and do what I love doing, just tell stories. We're all just storytellers, right?"
Read the full interview at The Hollywood Reporter.
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