Shelf Life: The Film That Changed My Life by Robert K. Elder
Thirty directors discuss a single film that made a lasting impact on their career and work with an insightful critic and columnist.
GENRE: Collected interviews
THE PITCH: Thirty directors discuss a single film that made a lasting impact on their career and work with an insightful critic and columnist.
THE REAL DRAW: Elder has a knack for keeping his conversations casual and disarmed while sticking to a relatively tight set of questions for each director. The longer interviews, like Danny Boyle on Apocalypse Now, sprawl out for pages of intimate, personal memories and tangents about film history, while others, like John Waters on The Wizard of Oz, are focused with witty jabs of insight. In either case, the conversations never feel forced or canned.
PETER BOGDONAVICH ON CITIZEN KANE: “It fucking flipped me out.”
HAPHAZARD SELECTION: The directors collected here run a gamut from commercially successful to artistically revered, domestic and foreign, contemporary and dated. Sticking to a specific generation or school of filmmakers might have given the book a more organized punch, but the haphazard selection still offers some fruitful intersections. Richard Linklater discusses Raging Bull before Kevin Smith discusses Linklater’s early masterpiece, Slacker. The influence of Orson Welles comes up with everyone from Frank Oz to Henry Jaglom, an interestingly wide range of directors.