Brian Koppelman: evaluation

Transcript context

…I’m sure that you — as is the case with myself — you know many very smart people who just don’t understand movies very well. If you show them Tarkovsky’s Solaris, they’d be bored, no matter how big the screen. If you had to explain, in as few dimensions as possible, what differentiates the really smart people who get movies from the really smart people who do not get movies, what’s going on there? Perhaps openness, perhaps the ability to not have to analyze in real time and to experience — and perhaps it’s a gateway thing. I find Casablanca is a remarkable tool to solve this problem because Kane is slow. Citizen Kane is slow, and Citizen Kane is very much a masterpiece with a capital M. Casablanca sneaks up on you. Casablanca is just fun. It’s fun from moment one. Citizen Kane is portentous — not pretentious, but portentous, right? From the moment it starts, you understand you’re supposed to take something very seriously. It’s in everything that Welles does. Casablanca is a delight. I have never met anyone immune to Casablanca’s charms, so it’s a gateway into understanding what makes great cinema, because if you get them . . . Now, a lot of people are resistant to sitting down and turning it on, or sitting down and watching it. But if you get someone to watch 10 minutes of Casablanca, and 10 minutes in, you go, “Hey, all right, cool. You tried, let’s go,” they’re like, “No, no, no, what happens?” Then you’ve got them. I do find it to be an incredible thing to hook people. I think All the President’s Men is another great example of a film that does that because right away, you are in this mystery. It doesn’t announce itself as proper cinema, but it is proper cinema. It deploys all the tools of proper cinema. It’s another gateway film, as is Raiders, the first one. Then I guess there are some people who could stand in front of a painting, and it just doesn’t move them. Maybe they think, “Well, I don’t like paintings.” Maybe they don’t like Caravaggio, but maybe they like Jasper Johns. They don’t know that they like Jasper Johns because they would never go look at a Jasper Johns. Or they don’t like Jasper Johns, but suddenly, they see something else that speaks to them. Poetry functions the same way, right, Tyler? Why are people immune to poetry, and other people — it just speaks to them? I see a clump distribution when it comes to cinema and Americans. Almost everyone I know quite likes Casablanca, but they draw a line somewhere, just as people will draw a line, maybe, with modern art or abstract art. They won’t love Fellini or Bergman or whatever else you want to put on that list. Who crosses that line, and who doesn’t?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.