Last Evening at SFIFF was a very special night for me, as I found myself in a cinema and beatnik swirl at the Sundance Kabuki Theater
First of all the Q&A with Walter Salles and Alejandro Inarritu was off the motherfucking chain!
Inarritu opened up with this to say, " A Mexican and a Braziallian sharing the stage together is very dangerous thing, so let's put down our guns now and talk about your Walter's sex life and Gael Garcia Bernel."
With this started a hurricane of comments and questions about Salle's career as filmmaker, for one being a Brazillian filmmaker and two a cinephile at heart.
The night continued to treat, with two short films from Salles
- A personal short that he made for his young son about introducing the relationship of cinema to him. It was so surreal to see Salles and Intritu siting close to the screen on the stage staring up at the images Salles has created, looking like to kids in a candy store when images from Chaplin and Wenders pop up on screen.
- Salles then put together a 60 min reel of his unfinished documentary project, In the Search of being On the Road, a grand magnium opus of filmmakers, poets, and super 8 home video footage about his dedication and frustration on his never ending search to getting Jack Kerouac's On the Road up on the big screen.
With his documentary On the Road, the image of it is all in the individual mind of all its readers that it has come touch since its 1957 publication. If can be done the best way is to make it like a Cassavettes's film Shadows or Faces, b&w and improvisation to its film setting core.
Salles also shared clips of an unknown 1961 beatesque film titled "The Exiles" about Native American youth living in LA. Something to put on the top of your Netflix queue
Leon: The Professional (1994)
