The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

30 Danny Boyle
on the ground, they all look bewildered and scared. And he gives them two
choices: You fight or you surf. Which one is it going to be? [laughs]
Coppola just piles everything into it. I think that’s the sequence that Coppola
appears in, and he just starts the washing machine, really. It’s insane.
The guy’s a genius, of course. When the girl runs out and puts the grenade
in the helicopter—that punctuation of the grand opera—those kinds
of observations are a great director at work. The guy sitting on his helmet
because he doesn’t want his balls blown off—those are punctuation
marks. You are watching a grand opera, but it’s not Brian De Palma; it’s not
Michael Bay. It’s a genuine, genuine artist, inhabiting a butcher’s abattoir
of resources. But he’s aware. He’s aware he’s in the abattoir because that’s
where we want him to be.
It’s the boldness of the concept, the conception of it—that you will take
part in this stunning physical attack, use the energy and the violence and
cinema, and you play it to grand opera. That, itself, has become a type of
pornography in a way.
There’s a whole strand of cinema that inhabits that; you think of the films
of Michael Bay. But Coppola is a filmmaker before all those guys existed;
he is a filmmaker who knew that and anticipated it. He’s not using it ironically.
He’s using it to give you intense pleasure, sheer physical pleasure as
it streams across your irises. I think he knew that’s what we were basically
going to become. That’s where visual stimulation in the cinema was taking
us. I don’t know if he knew it or not, but in his dementia, that’s what he gave
us. I’m sure that he knew it; that’s why he gave it to us. That’s why the film
lasts for so long in a way. You watch any film, especially films that are about
impact—visual, physical impact, aggressive energy—they date very, very
quickly. This doesn’t date. I can’t think of a bit of this film that dates.
Oh, and the other sequence I like, which is a much more subtle sequence,
is when they get out of the boat and they go for mangos. It’s an extraordinary
sequence of cinematography, just where he lights the jungle in these strips, like
kind of photographic strips of light, and they’re eventually jumped by a tiger.
That’s a great metaphor from Conrad, which is, “Never get out of the
boat.” Sheen repeats it in voiceover. In Conrad, the river is a symbolic
route of sanity, and the jungle is the unknown, insanity.