« Ryan Gosling's Oscar nom: All that money and my ass on the line | Main | Coma baby lives: New Line's Shaye daze »
February 19, 2007
Samouraï rising: Peter Webber's teen dream
Peter Webber remembers exactly where he was when he first saw Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï. He was 17, had bunked off games, and had headed straight for his favourite hang-out, the Electric cinema in Notting Hill. then a squalid fleapit, rather than the chi-chi picture house it is today. "I had managed to sign on for football and rugby, both of which I hated," he says. "The school playing fields were a bus ride away, so I'd just catch a different bus and spend the afternoon at the Electric. The rugby people thought I was playing football, and vice versa. I did get caught.... But by then I'd seen a lot of strange European films from the 1960s and '70s." The movie that made the greatest impact, "like pop music," on the young brain of the director of The Girl with the Pearl Earring and Hannibal Rising was Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 hitman thriller, Le Samouraï. "I'd heard a bit about Melville because, being a very pretentious teenager, I had got into the French New Wave filmmakers and had read that Melville was one of their forebears, as well as being a link between New Wave French cinema and American film noir. And what I loved about Le Samouraï was how abstract it was. Hardly anything happens. It is very still, very pure." [Webber describes the film at the link; it's available on Criterion DVD.]
Posted by Ray Pride at February 19, 2007 01:48 PM
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)