The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Introduction
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I learned as much about these directors by their choice of films as I did
from their own work. Perhaps John Landis says it best: “It’s extremely important
to know . . . that how you appreciate a movie has everything to do with
your life experience at the moment when you see it, how you see it, and where
you see it.”
He continues, “People who see 2001 on DVD, on an eighteen-inch TV,
letterboxed or not, that movie is not going to have the impact it did when
you saw it in a Cinerama theater in 70mm. It’s just not, it’s a different experience
. . . but that space station set to ‘Blue Danube’ is still one of the most
powerful images ever. And it’s just, how old were you when you saw it?
Where were you? How did you see it? Movies are subjective.”
And that’s why we keep coming back. Movies are not just movies, they
are mirrors of ourselves, our society, and our dreams—even if we’re not
quite ready for them. They make us laugh, cry, ponder our humanity, and
escape from it entirely.
And, for a few, movies make them want to go out and make more movies.
A Brief P.S.
Almost every director asked me this question, so here’s the answer:
The film that changed my life—that made me want to write about film—
was Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Specifically, it was the scene in
which an undercover cop learns how to be an undercover cop.
Spoiler alert: It’s Tim Roth. His character learns a cover story—in this case,
the story of a marijuana deal. We see him learning the story, scene by scene,
practicing it over time. Then, he tells the story with increasing detail and
finesse to gangsters he’s infiltrating. In the next beat, Tarantino puts his character
in the story he’s telling. We see him walk into a bathroom with a bag of
weed to find himself in the company of policemen and their drug-sniffing dog.
And the dog starts barking.
And then our hero, the undercover cop, begins talking inside the story
he’s telling—shaping the details of the story as he’s in the bathroom, a drug
dog barking at him and his black bag of marijuana.
It’s an amazing sequence, a piece of virtuosic directing—not a story
within a story, but a single story told by a character learning the story, telling
it and then—knowing it so well—living that lie.