The Best of Everything Chapter I: Quantum of Solace

by Steven Boone
"The Best of Everything" is a book of essays about the first decade of movie culture in this new century-- except that I don't know how to write books, so here it is in video form.


The Best of Everything Chapter One: Quantum of Solace from Steven Boone on Vimeo.
Chapter One is about being down and out in New York City while still foolishly pursuing movie love and the love of a woman out of reach...


Thanks to Matt Zoller Seitz, Jason Zinoman, Jennifer Anise and Kevin Harvey for helping me get this part "finished"*. (*There's sure to be different edits and tweaks in its future.)

"When they are impossible to make, that’s the time to make them."

 Image © Miguel Macias

Excerpted from The Wrap.


IÑÁRRITU Corporations have a lot to do with it, and the marketing and the dictatorship of capitalism is the worst. It’s the worst f___ing dictatorship that we have ever seen, because there is no basis, there is no religion, there is no politics behind it. Their religion and god is f___ing money, in the hands of who we will never know. That’s a very scary thing.

And there is no analysis. Nobody is talking about cinema, or the language of cinema, the craft of cinema. Everybody's talking about power, celebrity, awards, boxoffice. That’s it. That game is played by everybody.


And it didn’t used to be?

DEL TORO There was a clear generation in the 1960s and '70s that grew up with a certain type of cinema, that broke with that and found the auteur theory, and for the next 20 years that was the discourse that was adopted. If you were a film lover, you were able to talk about Hitchcock, Ford, Truffaut, Bunel, Godard in the same breath.

My problem is that in the last 20 years, the film connoisseurs have completely co-opted the industry language: demographics, opening weekend, boxoffice projections, easy to market. When you go to a blog or to a comments section and you have people adopting the lingo of the industry and talking about a movie by not discussing if it's good or bad or art, they're just saying "really hard to market, I don’t know what audience they're trying to reach," I get really depressed.

You couldn't make "Pan's Labyrinth" now?

DEL TORO I think you could, in a way, but you would have to make the movie different, and smaller. And not only do I think you could make it smaller, but I plan to make movies like that again. The fact that there are no structures the way we knew them doesn’t mean that we need to quit. F___ that. This is the time to make these movies. When they are impossible to make, that’s the time to make them.