Nowa­days, most of us who still reli­gious­ly attend screen­ings of films by the most respect­ed Euro­pean direc­tors of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry have cir­cled the wag­ons: even if we far pre­fer, say, Felli­ni to Truf­faut, we’ll more than like­ly still turn up for the Truf­faut, even if only out of cinephilic sol­i­dar­i­ty. But in the fifties, six­ties, and sev­en­ties — or so I’ve read, any­way — dis­cus­sions of such film­mak­ers’ rel­a­tive mer­its could turn into seri­ous intel­lec­tu­al shov­ing match­es, and even many of the lumi­nar­ies them­selves would eval­u­ate their col­leagues’ work can­did­ly. At the Ing­mar Bergman fan site Bergmanora­ma, you can read what the mak­er of The Sev­enth Seal, Wild Straw­ber­ries, and Per­sona had to say about the mak­ers of movies like L’Avven­tu­ra, Breath­less, Ver­ti­go, The Exter­mi­nat­ing Angel, The 400 Blows, and Stalk­er.

Regard­ing Jean Luc Godard: “I’ve nev­er been able to appre­ci­ate any of his films, nor even under­stand them… I find his films affect­ed, intel­lec­tu­al, self-obsessed and, as cin­e­ma, with­out inter­est and frankly dull… I’ve always thought that he made films for crit­ics.”

Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni, thought Bergman, had “nev­er prop­er­ly learnt his craft. He’s an aes­thete. If, for exam­ple, he needs a cer­tain kind of road for The Red Desert, then he gets the hous­es repaint­ed on the damned street. That is the atti­tude of an aes­thete. He took great care over a sin­gle shot, but did­n’t under­stand that a film is a rhyth­mic stream of images, a liv­ing, mov­ing process; for him, on the con­trary, it was such a shot, then anoth­er shot, then yet anoth­er. So, sure, there are some bril­liant bits in his films… [but] I can’t under­stand why Anto­nioni is held in such high esteem.”

Alfred Hitch­cock struck him as “a very good tech­ni­cian. And he has some­thing in Psy­cho, he had some moments. Psy­cho is one of his most inter­est­ing pic­tures because he had to make the pic­ture very fast, with very prim­i­tive means. He had lit­tle mon­ey, and this pic­ture tells very much about him. Not very good things. He is com­plete­ly infan­tile, and I would like to know more — no, I don’t want to know — about his behav­iour with, or, rather, against women. But this pic­ture is very inter­est­ing.”

You’ll find more quotes on F.W. Mur­nau, teller of image-based tales with “fan­tas­tic sup­ple­ness”; Mar­cel Carné and Julien Duvivi­er, “deci­sive influ­ences in my want­i­ng to become a film­mak­er”; Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, the sheer heat from whose cre­ative mind “melts him”; François Truf­faut, with his fas­ci­nat­ing “way of relat­ing with an audi­ence”; and Andrei Tarkovsky, “the great­est of them all,” at Bergmanora­ma. His com­ments on Luis Buñuel offer espe­cial­ly impor­tant advice for cre­ators in any medi­um, of any age. He quotes a crit­ic who wrote that “with Autumn Sonata Bergman does Bergman” and admits the truth in it, but he adds that, at some point, “Tarkovsky began to make Tarkovsky films and that Felli­ni began to make Felli­ni films.” Buñuel, alas, “near­ly always made Buñuel films.” The les­son: if you must do a pas­tiche, don’t do a pas­tiche of your own style — or, as I once heard the writer Geoff Dyer (him­self a great fan of mid­cen­tu­ry Euro­pean cin­e­ma) call it, “self-karaoke.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stan­ley Kubrick to Ing­mar Bergman: “You Are the Great­est Film­mak­er at Work Today” (1960)

Ing­mar Bergman’s Soap Com­mer­cials Wash Away the Exis­ten­tial Despair

Dick Cavett’s Wide-Rang­ing TV Inter­view with Ing­mar Bergman and Lead Actress Bibi Ander­s­son (1971)

How Woody Allen Dis­cov­ered Ing­mar Bergman, and How You Can Too

Tarkovsky Films Now Free Online

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

“I love the smell of napalm in the morn­ing.” There we have undoubt­ed­ly the most famous quote of what must count as one of Robert Duval­l’s finest per­for­mances, and sure­ly his most sur­pris­ing: that of Lieu­tenant Colonel Bill Kil­go­re in Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la’s Apoc­a­lypse Now. As you’ll no doubt recall — and if you don’t recall it, min­i­mize your brows­er for a few hours and make your way to a screen­ing, or at least watch it online — Cap­tain Ben­jamin Willard’s Con­ra­di­an boat jour­ney into the Viet­nam War’s dark heart hits a snag fair­ly ear­ly in the pic­ture: they need to pass through a coastal area under tight Viet Cong con­trol.

Kil­go­re, ini­tial­ly reluc­tant to call in his heli­copters to back up Willard’s dubi­ous mis­sion, changes his mind when he real­izes that Willard counts among his own small crew famed pro­fes­sion­al surfer Lance B. John­son. The Lieu­tenant Colonel, it turns out, loves to surf. He also loves to blast Richard Wag­n­er’s “Ride of the Valkyries” from heli­copter-mount­ed speak­ers. “It scares the hell out of the slopes,” he explains. “My boys love it.”

At the top, you can watch the fruits of Willard and Kil­go­re’s coop­er­a­tion, an oper­at­ic napalm airstrike that takes the entire beach: not an easy thing to accom­plish, and cer­tain­ly not an easy thing to film. As any­one acquaint­ed with the mak­ing of Apoc­a­lypse Now has heard, the pro­duc­tion tend­ed to turn as com­pli­cat­ed, con­fus­ing, and per­ilous as the Viet­nam War itself, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly for lack of plan­ning.

At Empire, you can view the scene’s orig­i­nal sto­ry­boards and read along­side them a brief inter­view with Doug Clay­bourne, who on the film had the envi­able title of Heli­copter Wran­gler. Arriv­ing to the Philip­pines-based shoot (in “the mid­dle of nowhere”), Clay­bourne found Cop­po­la on the beach with a bull­horn, Mar­tin Sheen just replac­ing Har­vey Kei­t­el in the role of Willard, chop­pers bor­rowed from Pres­i­dent Fer­di­nand Mar­cos (who peri­od­i­cal­ly took them back to use against insur­rec­tions else­where), a com­ing typhoon, and “a lot of chaos.”

But Cop­po­la, Clay­bourne, and the rest of the team saw it through, achiev­ing results even more strik­ing, in moments, than these sto­ry­boards sug­gest. As for the unflap­pable Kil­go­re, well, we all remem­ber him rush­ing to catch a tan­ta­liz­ing wave even before the fight­ing sub­sides. After all, to quote his sec­ond-most famous line, “Char­lie don’t surf!”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Aki­ra Kuro­sawa & Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la Star in Japan­ese Whisky Com­mer­cials (1980)

Demen­tia 13: The Film That Took Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la From Schlock­ster to Auteur

Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Hand­writ­ten Cast­ing Notes for The God­fa­ther

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.