Thelma & Louise Revisited
Aug. 22nd, 2003 05:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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andrastewhite and myself are clearly destined to geeky supervillaindom. She wrote another scene for our threatened Trio subplot to Once More, With Feeling. Go and and admire hers here. Then read mine again. I'm narcistic like that. Thelma & Louise I loved from the moment I watched it first in the cinema all those years ago, but had not seen for a while until aquiring the new DVD. So worth it, people. Not just because the movie is gorgeous, but because we get two sets of commentaries - Ridley Scott doing the director's pov, and on a separate track, Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis and Callie Khouri giving us the actresses and writer's pov. Both commentaries are fascinating, but because I know
ide_cyan is more curious about the girls, I'll describe theirs first, then Scott's. They were all recorded at the same time (which isn't always the case, alas, with commentaries), which makes for delightful interaction between the three women. They start out with the teasing and fun anecdotes and as the film progresses get into more serious territory. This had been Callie Khouri's breakthrough as a script writer - she had directed rock videos before - and originally she had wanted to direct it, too, but couldn't find the financial backing. Ruefully, she comments that even if she had she would never have been able to afford Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis, and praises Ridley Scott's direction with one caveat - the only thing she would have done differently were the scenes with the trucker, because he comes across more as comedy relief than as genuinely threatening and molesting. (Scott comments on the trucker as well - see below.) The actresses both mention how good it was having her on the set; Geena Davis says that when she asked one detail about Thelma's backstory (did Thelma have a sister?), Callie Khouri came up with a complete 20 page life story of Thelma.
For Khouri, a crucial point of motivation was writing women who felt "complete" (a term she uses repeatedly); she had been frustrated by the love interest and mother parts the cinema usually offers (and here Sarandon and Davis agree that hasn't changed much post-Thelma & Louise). She reminisces that she so liked the character of Marion in Raiders of the lost Arc, and would have loved to see her further developed in the series, and felt so disappointed and betrayed when tough independent Marion was replaced by "someone afraid to break a nail" in the second movie. Of the post-T&L films, the one who spontaneously occurs to her with women who feel complete is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
They all agree that the accusation that T&L bashes males is ridiculous - from Harvey Keitel's character (whom Sarandon calls "a saint") to the rapist in the bar, you get the whole scala. What Sarandon in particular points out that there is a moral sense in this film which you don't usually get in male revenge movies; her character, Louise, slowly but surely unravels under the pressure of what she has done. Khouri says that the narrative wasn't about "women taking control", because they're not in control of their lives from the second of the shooting onwards, they have to improvise from moment to moment, but they are also not in anybody else's control anymore, either. She plotted the script from the ending backwards, and was incredibly relieved her ending was kept.
Khouri is also very happy with something that Scott mentions in his commentary as well - the outward transformation of Thelma and Louise from overdressed and full of make-up to sun-burnt and natural, and in fact much more beautiful, because that was how she had imagined it. At which point Davis and Sarandon drily comment that they agree but have to point out they needed in fact longer make-up hours for the later part of the film to achieve that tanned, wild and make-up free look.*g*
Anecdote-wise: apparently Davis got herself coached for a Georgian accent before learning that the movie actually starts in Arkansas!
As Scott does, they praise Christopher MacDonald (who plays Thelma's husband Darryl) for his comedic performance and gifted improvisation (apparently MacDonald adlibbed a lot). And they're full of compliments about Brad Pitt, whose small but important part as J.D. in this movie brought him international fame for the first time. In fact, they don't have a bad word for anyone except the critic who thought the cop's finger out of the air holes Thelma shot in the car was a phallic symbol…
Now to Ridley Scott's commentary. Which includes some reminiscences about some other movies of his like Alien or Blade Runner as well. (Talk about endings - Scott is still angry with himself for letting the studio add the fake happy ending after the previews showed the audience reacting negatively to his original one, which was in fact restored in the Director's Release version. "I should have stuck to my guns.") It's a visual-oriented commentary, and what he says about a European's perspective on America struck a nerve, because repeatedly I thought "Exactly!". For example, during an early night scene he points out it's not black but blue and full of lights and says he never got over that first impression of America - glitter. All those lights on the road. It was almost the same for me, only in my case it was all those lights of New York City, as seen from the World Trade Center where I went on the evening after I landed. But American glitter - exactly.
And then all the telegraph posts on the highways, which are now disappearing, or the combination of a hotel swimming pool and trucks driving on the road, or the line dancing which he saw for the first time in the bar where they filmed and promptly incorporated in the movie. It's so exotic if you're from Europe. Scott says he never settled down in the US but kept switching to and thro to keep that European perspective, because that way he hopes his way of viewing the US landscape and people will remain fresh. He adds that the score is by a German, Hans Zimmer, and the guitar is played by a guy from Suffolk (and Scott himself of course is British), and yet the final product is quintessential American because if you aren't yourself, you long for the mythical America in your head.
Referring to his background of starting with TV commercials, he calls it the best film school ever (there's an element of "TV commercial director and proud of it!" here, probably because there was much snobbery about it back when Scott started in feature films, before the aesthetics he used influenced in turn dozens of other movies), except for working with actors, which he had to learn anew when going into features. Says there is nothing worse than an actor who thinks the movie is dumb and only does it for the money (tempting to speculate whom he might be thinking of here - Brando comes to mind, but then Scott also famously didn't get along with Harrison Ford who to this day isn't reconciled to Blade Runner), and nothing better than an actor who really thinks about her or his part and brings their own creativity on board. One has to give them room for it, of course.
His observations on Thelma and Louise themselves are mostly, but not always, the same as those of Khouri, Sarandon and Davis. The main differences: he thinks they have a mother and daughter dynamic at the beginning (with Louise as the mother), which switches after the J.D. incident so that Thelma is the mother, whereas the three ladies don't use the term at all. The other difference is in his recounting on why they changed the scene between Louise and Jimmy at the hotel. He remembers that it was supposed to be a goodbye love scene, complete with sex, and thinks they changed it because Louise already knows that no matter what happens, this relationship is over, and wouldn't want to raise Jimmy's hopes that way. Khouri remembers that she originally wrote it as an impromptu marriage love scene but without the sex, and Sarandon remembers that by the time she talked with Scott about it, there was sex in it, but that they changed the scene because a) Louise was quietly unravelling and had her big emotional outburst ahead once she and Thelma would discover the money was gone the next morning, and a love-plus-sex-scene would have interrupted that process, and b) two competing sex scenes wouldn't have been good. "And Thelma had to get laid," Khouri agrees with a smile in her voice.
About the trucker: Scott says "would you believe the guy went on and played Hamlet" and adds that the actor told him after this role (i.e. the leering trucker, not Hamlet), he would never get another date. "Which might possibly have been true." Afterwards, he heard from many women similar things happened to them, which amazed him. He says it's important that Thelma and Louise blow up the truck as payback but do not harm the trucker himself; they DON'T want to kill (or physically hurt) anyone else. Not during the trucker scenes but earlier in the movie Scott reminiscences that he loved working with Callie Khouri, and he, too, says there was just one thing they disagreed on. He does not specifically name it as she did but says it was going for comedy in some scenes. Which in his opinion was the right thing to do because a) you need some laughs in a film like this and b) said laughs mean more audience, and you want this film to reach as many people as possible.
His vocabulary and comparisons are quite English - "constablery" for the police chasing the women at the end, for example. Also comparing Brad Pitt's character J.D. to the legendary highwayman Dick Turpin "who charmed the necklaces of the ladies". He doesn't think J.D. went to the hotel room to Thelma with the intention of robbing her, that was a split decision once he saw the money, but once he saw it, that was it. Scott usually calls the characters by the actor's names - i.e. Harvey, Brad, Chris - but not Thelma and Louise themselves, except when he talks about specific shots (as when Thelma is seen reflected in the car's mirror near the end, "that is one of my favourite shots of Geena", not Thelma). Otherwise it's "I love what Thelma does here", or "Louise is still the mother here", but "Harvey of course tries to understand them".
All in all a great movie, and two great commentaries. And the DVD offers yet more - a documentary which is still ahead of me!
Lastly, supporting my future geeky supervillain destiny are some quizzes:
What Type of Villain are You?
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And also:
How Would YOU Take Over the World?
On the other hand:
You are an Orthodox Snapeist.
You take Canon!Snape at face value -- like JKR
says, Snape is "a deeply horrible
person". You like to write/read stories
where he's portrayed as supercilious, unfair,
often undignified, and sometimes downright
cruel. You may accept some partial
explanations for his behavior when they're
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on him, and don't like to let him off the hook.
The guy's a nasty, unwashed git -- it says so
in the books!
What kind of Snapeist are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
But... aside from Harry, he's the most interesting character to me!
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no subject
Date: 2003-08-21 08:11 pm (UTC)Great to read about T&L. I have it on video, but that doesn't have any special features on it. Thanks for sharing!
no subject
Date: 2003-08-21 08:16 pm (UTC)I never got the accusations of male-bashing, really. Clearly, Louise shot Thelma's attacker after the imminent threat was past. She knew it. She knew she shot him because she was just so damn angry. That's why she ran. She'd murdered someone.
One of my favorite small moments is when Thelma tells Louise to "shoot out the radio" in the patrolman's car. Louise promptly takes aim at the AM/FM dial, and Thelma says, "Louise, the police radio."
I'm curious to know if the DVD contains the missing scene with the Rastafarian bicyclist pedaling along the back roads, and how he blows some soothing ganja smoke through one of the air-holes in the cop's car trunk. I saw that in the theater, and never saw it again. It is unnecessary, and lifts right out, but still....
"BladeRunner" - I admit I saw the original release more than once, but I much prefer the director's cut. And I love the original Philip K. Dick novel ("Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") a hundred times more than either film version.
The Rastafarian bicyclist is in.
Date: 2003-08-21 08:48 pm (UTC)P.S. Blade Runner
Date: 2003-08-22 08:32 am (UTC)Thanks!
Date: 2003-08-21 09:38 pm (UTC)But I'm SO glad that K, S & G recorded theirs together! I doubly want to listen to it now. Don't have the money to buy this edition, but I suppose I could rent it from the video club... or just save up, and sell the old version, or something. It was the first DVD I ever bought, or one of the first few.
(Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is so relentlessly unhappy, though, that I'm sad there wasn't a better example for Khouri to cite.)
Word on Marion Crane.
Re: Thanks!
Date: 2003-08-21 09:40 pm (UTC)Spielberg & Hitchcock
Date: 2003-08-21 11:43 pm (UTC)Re: Spielberg & Hitchcock
Date: 2003-08-22 01:30 am (UTC)Spielberg... I'm liking less and less. Rewatching the Indiana Jones films recently made me suddenly aware of how violent they are, I felt quite irked at Close Encounters's off-handed death toll, and there's a huge rant against A.I. in my LJ from last year. Visually, he's brilliant, and his kinetism puts the Greek back in cinema, but some of the movies he makes have a way of leaving a bad taste in my brain, once the fun's worn off.
Re: Spielberg & Hitchcock
Date: 2003-08-22 02:58 am (UTC)Spielberg: depends on the film. I love E.T., have a soft spot for "The Colour Purple", think "Empire of the Sun" is underappreciated and love "Minority Report". Also, I didn't have a problem with AI's time jump at the end (which btw had been in Kubrick's scenario), or indeed with A.I. itself, though it will never make it into my favourites list. I hated only two of his movies with a passion: "Temple of Doom" and "Hook".
Re: Spielberg & Hitchcock
Date: 2003-08-22 03:37 am (UTC)There are a lot of Spielberg films I haven't seen. I liked Minority Report (is it just me, or did it have more female characters than most other Spielberg films?).
Temple of Doom I only caught the end of the other week. In time to see all the turbaned baddies be squished, shot, or fed to the crocs, although I remember Willie's squeamishness and retrospectively despise the demonisation of Kali, who is one of my favourite goddesses. I saw Hook first time around in theatres when I was still young enough to enthuse about wearing Peter Pan-like slippers afterwards (though the fur lining grew too hot, and I soon reverted to my Hobbit-like attire), but I now really, really hate the Maggie/Jack dichotomy in it. I'd love to hear your reasons for loathing them.
("If you don't have something nice to say about someone, sit next to me," as Dotty said.) (http://www.livejournal.com/users/ide_cyan/20164.html)
Reasons for loathing:
Date: 2003-08-22 04:23 am (UTC)(Positive counter example of Spielberg doing the father/son complex thing in a creative fashion: Empire of the Son. Because here the pseudo father figure is irredeemably corrupt and presented as such - heck, it's John Malcovich! - and the son is easily the most interesting of Spielberg's child heroes with the arguable exception of Elliot in E.T., because said boy, Jim, is anything but cute. He starts out as a spoiled brat and ends as a pragmatic survivor but traumatized to the nth degree and unable to reconnect with his parents when they show up at the end. Oh, and there's sex in this story of puberty! Discreet, but there is, when our boy in puberty watches two adults and does not look away.)
Hook: Again, father/son complex used the wrong way. Daughters ignored. And I hate the American obsession with baseball. And the idea of adulthood=corruption and Peter Pan having to get in touch with his inner child. There is a deeply sinister aspect to the original Peter Pan tale, to me at least, and I used that in a fanfic about a Highlander character, an 800-years old boy who kills an adult who takes him to watch Peter Pan because the adult thinks it's cute. (When JKR said in her BBC interview just before Order of the Phoenix was released that she always thought the Peter Pan idea - of a child not growing up - was one of the most horrible things ever, I cheered.)
Still on Spielberg; writers
Date: 2003-08-22 05:01 am (UTC)With Hook, the script didn't adapt the story as much as fanfic a sequel to it, so the fidelity to the source material had less chance of keeping crappy sentimentalism out. I still haven't read Barrie's Peter Pan itself, only a novelisation of the Disney film with precious little content, but I agree with Rowling, and I've seen variations on this theme of horror: "Jeffty is Five", by Harlan Ellison, and "The Wild Girls", by Jane Yolen. (Though the latter isn't exactly addressing the same problem with Peter Pan, but Wendy's, rather.)
I had enough of the baseball obsession watching the first couple of seasons of Star Trek: DS9.
Where's your fanfic? :-)
Oh, and an amusing note: I thrilled at the character of future archaeologist Bernice Summerfield, from the Doctor Who New Adventures, who, it was not-so-subtly-implied, taught Indian Jones everything he knew about wielding a whip. *g*
Re: Still on Spielberg; writers
Date: 2003-08-22 08:28 am (UTC)The writers of the movies Spielberg did might have something to do with the level of schlock they contain.
Good point. Regarding Empire, I forgot Christian Bale (still a kid then) is fabulous as Ballard's youthful alter ego.
E.T. was written by a woman, whose most recent claim to fame, alas, seems to have been being dumped by Harrison Ford after 18 years of marriage. Why isn't she more famous in her own right?
Good question. Also: He dumped her? (I'm not keeping up with celebrity gossip for the most part.) Didn't she also write or co-write some other scripts for Kathleen Kennedy, Spielberg's co-producer at the time?
I still haven't read Barrie's Peter Pan itself
I read Peter Pan and Peter and Wendy. It's compelling in its way, and Barrie makes Peter a far more blatant egotist than the Disney version, which children are, of course. But I daily change my mind on whether he was aware or not of the implications the concept had. One of his plays, Dear Brutus contains, among other things, a very moving and searing depiction of a middle-aged couple who are in their way predecessors of George and Martha in Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf, only in their case, they really had a child and lost it. In the course of the play, they get offered the child back, complete with happiness, but the cost is living an eternal child fantasy and abandoning everything in their lives which happened since. Regressing, in a word. And in the end, they refuse this.
DS9: yes, the baseball obsession was one of its few flaws. When I saw Sheridan starting with the baseball on B5 as well in Knives, I just about screamed.
My fanfiction: the story I referred to, Fearful Symmetry isn't online because I wrote it for a fanzine. Also, I'll have to repost my early HL stuff one of these days. My other fanfic is here. (http://www.fanfiction.net/profile.php?userid=6273).
Mathison
Date: 2003-08-22 09:15 am (UTC)http://uk.imdb.com/Name?Mathison,+Melissa
Re: Mathison
Date: 2003-08-22 09:26 am (UTC)