The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

34 Danny Boyle
And, as a filmmaker, is that a safety net? That you’re not able to go mad
in the jungle?
Boyle: I don’t think you are anymore. I think they’ve learned to protect
themselves from that. Some people would evoke certain other films that
spiraled hideously out of control in a way. But none more appropriately than
this, really, none with a context more appropriate than this.
You always dream of doing something like this but I think, when we
were making The Beach, I certainly felt foolishly self-conscious because of
trying to reinvoke it in some way. This is not some kind of ironic experience,
repeating it, when this kind of thing happens. You can’t control it. You can’t
actually force things to happen. It will just happen. So being ironic or trying
to re-create bits of this is just ridiculous. It’s infantile.
Well, and you probably know a bit of the history—Orson Welles tried
to make Heart of Darkness for years and there were another couple of
attempts by other filmmakers. But in your estimation, how was Coppola
able to succeed where so many others had failed?
Boyle: I think, principally, because he’s a genius. He clearly was. He was
supremely talented and not particularly a modernist in style terms, like
Scor sese. He’s actually a classical filmmaker, but a classical filmmaker who
had all the adrenaline of a modernist because he was so at his peak of his
powers as a classicist. Because there is an argument that a classicist cannot
use what a modernist uses to create. A classicist at the absolute peak
of his powers can do it effortlessly. Certainly when you watch Apocalypse
Now, you are not aware of technique. You think you’re just observing what’s
happening in front of you, not being manipulated with whip pans or crash
zooms or all the techniques.
So he was at the absolute height of his powers and also at the peak of
his arrogance, understandably, considering he decided to take on the system
and had just won the Oscar for the second time with The Godfather II,
which everyone thought was superior to the first one. You get the impression,
again in the Biskind book, that he slightly disapproves of the first
Godfather, doesn’t he?
Well, it’s because he fought for creative control.