The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

162 Arthur Hiller
movies like that,” but I guess I was feeling that without realizing it. The
same as when I finally woke up and said, “I want to be a director.”
So, obviously, something was going on inside me that I didn’t know was
going on. I mean, I knew how much I loved theater. I guess you just don’t
realize that, gee, you can do that for a living—that you can make a movie. Or
that you can get into that business and work at it.
And how does that apply to neorealism? That you can use nonprofessional
actors? Or political issues? What sort of epiphanies did neorealism
open up for you?
Hiller: I think I leaned to that; I always thought once I started work,
like I started in public affairs broadcasting. Through a whole set of lucky
circumstances I ended up as a director in public affairs and doing talk
shows. So again, because of my theater, I started radio documentaries or
drama documentaries. It’d be a drama but about a social problem, a civic
issue or something like that. And that’s always appealed to me, that kind
of reality.
Open City, for a lot of Americans, was the first movie out of Italy after
the war. It was America’s first look at Italy. What was that like, not only
as a former soldier, but just an American, to look at that type of everyday
life in another country?
Hiller: It’s funny, I knew it was in Italy, but the feeling for me was the reality
and the feel of the people.
Open City started out as a documentary. They were going to film a documentary
about Don Morisoni, a priest who had been executed by the Nazis.
Hiller: I didn’t even know that. All these years and I’ve not known that.
There was no film after the war, no studios. The story was that Rossellini
scraped together 35mm film from street photographers and they
spliced it together. Is that why Open City retains sort of a documentarytype
feel?
Hiller: I think it’s the way he shot it. But you’re right, it may have been
that it was lack of film. He couldn’t go to too many interesting visuals and