William Fried­kin, who died yes­ter­day, will be most wide­ly remem­bered as the direc­tor of nine­teen-sev­en­ties genre hits like The French Con­nec­tion and The Exor­cist. But it was in the sub­se­quent decade that he made his most impres­sive pic­ture, at least accord­ing to the Paper Star­ship video essay above. As its nar­ra­tor Mar­cus Mus­ca­to puts it, Fried­kin’s To Live and Die in L.A. came out in 1985 as “a per­fect blend­ing of the crime and rene­gade cop gen­res, drenched bril­liant­ly in eight­ies aes­thet­ic and nihilis­tic exis­ten­tial glo­ry.” Over near­ly half an hour, he breaks down every major ele­ment of this “sub­ver­sive mas­ter­piece,” from its simul­ta­ne­ous­ly slick and dingy look and feel to its tech­ni­cal and nar­ra­tive brazen­ness to its sound­track by none oth­er than Wang Chung.

Like Fried­kin’s ear­li­er crime films, To Live and Die in L.A. traces “the thin line between cops and crim­i­nals, stat­ing how some of the best cops have some crim­i­nal in them, or have been crim­i­nals them­selves.” It does most of this through the char­ac­ter of Secret Ser­vice agent Richard Chance, played by William Petersen as a kind of “nihilis­tic Fonzie.” In pur­suit of Willem Dafoe’s sin­is­ter artist-coun­ter­feit­er Rick Mas­ters, Chance shows no cau­tion, and his dar­ing-to-the-point-of-reck­less ded­i­ca­tion. Fried­kin matched it with his own “spon­ta­neous, anti-author­i­tar­i­an guer­ril­la film­mak­ing,”  covert­ly shoot­ing and using per­for­mances his actors (whom he was­n’t above encour­ag­ing to do some rule-break­ing of their own) had been led to believe were rehearsals.

Fried­kin and his col­lab­o­ra­tors metic­u­lous­ly planned and painstak­ing­ly exe­cut­ed oth­er sequences, such as the cen­tral car chase. “The chase isn’t just on a free­way. It goes the wrong way down the free­way,” wrote Roger Ebert in his con­tem­po­rary review. “I don’t know how Fried­kin chore­o­graphed this scene, and I don’t want to know.” How­ev­er aston­ish­ing (and anx­i­ety-induc­ing) it remains today, it would­n’t be as effec­tive with­out the “hyp­no­tiz­ing yet ener­getic atmos­phere” cre­at­ed through­out the film by the music of Wang Chung, a band both indeli­bly asso­ci­at­ed with the eight­ies and also pos­sessed of a pen­chant for uncon­ven­tion­al, even sin­is­ter son­ic tex­tures. That’s true even of their ear­li­er sin­gles: wit­ness how well “Wait,” released in 1983, suits the ver­tig­i­nous plunge of the film’s star­tling but chill­ing­ly inevitable end­ing.

Yet even this con­clu­sion is just one mem­o­rable part among many. “Along with one of the great­est chase scenes, the film con­tains one of the most authen­tic and aes­thet­i­cal­ly pleas­ing depic­tions of the mon­ey coun­ter­feit­ing process,” Mus­ca­to says. Those with an aver­sion to spoil­ers would do best to watch the movie itself before the video essay, but like the work of any respectable auteur, it draws its pow­er from much more than plot twists. Its main theme, as Fried­kin him­self put it, was the “coun­ter­feit world: coun­ter­feit emo­tions, coun­ter­feit mon­ey, the coun­ter­feit super­struc­ture of the Secret Ser­vice. Every­one in the film has a kind of coun­ter­feit motive.” Giv­en that the world has become no more real over the past four decades, per­haps it’s no won­der that To Live and Die in L.A. holds up so well today.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Scari­est Film of All Time?: Revis­it­ing the Hys­te­ria in 1973 Around The Exor­cist by William Fried­kin (RIP)

Watch Randy Newman’s Tour of Los Ange­les’ Sun­set Boule­vard, and You’ll Love L.A. Too

Who Designed the 1980s Aes­thet­ic?: Meet the Mem­phis Group, the Design­ers Who Cre­at­ed the 80s Icon­ic Look

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Christo­pher Nolan has by now inspired at least a cou­ple gen­er­a­tions of young view­ers to dream of becom­ing film­mak­ers. For my own age cohort, the touch­stone work was his break­out pic­ture Memen­to, with its reverse-ordered sto­ry fea­tur­ing a pro­tag­o­nist unable to cre­ate new mem­o­ries. Oth­ers may have felt a greater impact from the real­i­ty-bend­ing Incep­tion or the dystopi­an sci-fi vision of Inter­stel­lar (to say noth­ing of all those Bat­man movies). But whether at the turn of the mil­len­ni­um or today, with Nolan’s lat­est fea­ture Oppen­heimer rid­ing high at the box office, the best advice for such aspi­rants is the same: watch as many movies as pos­si­ble.

‘The prob­lem with Chris,” says Oppen­heimer star Cil­lian Mur­phy in the video above, “is that he’s seen every film ever made.” “Not every film,” Nolan replies, a hand-wav­ing denial that only bol­sters the accu­sa­tion. This takes place amid the shelves of JM Vidéo, one of the last two video stores still stand­ing in the cinephile cap­i­tal of Paris.

Nolan and Mur­phy paid a vis­it there to shoot an episode of Kon­bi­ni Video Club, a Youtube series that has also brought on such auteurs as Wes Ander­son, David Cro­nen­berg, and Ter­ry Gilliam. JM Vidéo feels like an espe­cial­ly suit­able space for Nolan, giv­en his advo­ca­cy of phys­i­cal media. On the defin­i­tive Blu-Ray and 4k ver­sions of his films, he explains, “there’s much less com­pres­sion,” and “we con­trol the col­or and the pic­ture and the bright­ness,” where­as stream­ing is “like broad­cast­ing a film: we don’t have much con­trol over how it goes out.”

Nolan pulls off the shelves There Will Be Blood and Punch-Drunk Love, the work of his con­tem­po­rary Paul Thomas Ander­son, as well as clas­sics that shaped his own direc­to­r­i­al choic­es: Cit­i­zen Kane, For­eign Cor­re­spon­dent, Lawrence of Ara­bia, Dr. Strangelove. That last was for­bid­den view­ing dur­ing the devel­op­ment of Oppen­heimer: “I’m a big fan of Strangelove, but I stopped watch­ing it for a cou­ple of years while we were mak­ing the film, because it’s too daunt­ing” — and because its black­ly satir­i­cal take on how the men in con­trol of the bomb decide the fate of the world could­n’t pos­si­bly have been improved upon. “I’m glad you did­n’t men­tion it,” adds Mur­phy, who may not have seen as many movies as Nolan, but whose range of ref­er­ence nev­er­the­less demon­strates his own cinephile cre­den­tials. “No fight­ing in the war room.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Films of Christo­pher Nolan Explored in a Sweep­ing 4‑Hour Video Essay: Memen­to, The Dark Knight, Inter­stel­lar & More

Wes Ander­son Vis­its a Paris Video Store and High­lights the Films He Loves: Kuro­sawa, Truf­faut, Buñuel & More

David Cro­nen­berg Vis­its a Video Store & Talks About His Favorite Movies

Ter­ry Gilliam Vis­its a Video Store & Talks About His Favorite Movies and Actors

Hear 9 Hours of Hans Zim­mer Sound­tracks: Dunkirk, Inter­stel­lar, Incep­tion, The Dark Knight & Much More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Wes Ander­son­’s lat­est pic­ture Aster­oid City is named for the small Ari­zona town (pop­u­la­tion: 87) in which its cen­tral sto­ry takes place. That town, in turn, is named for the inci­dent that made it (mod­est­ly) famous: the impact of an aster­oid that left behind a large crater. That crater was one of the fea­tures that Ander­son and his pro­duc­tion design­ers had to make for the shoot — but then, so was every­thing else in Aster­oid City, which had to be raised whole in an out-of-the-way area of Spain. Unlike­ly though it may sound in itself, the cin­e­mat­ic project of re-cre­at­ing the Amer­i­can West in south­ern Europe isn’t with­out prece­dent: the “Spaghet­ti West­erns” of the nine­teen-six­ties and sev­en­ties also relied on the Span­ish desert to pro­vide the right atmos­phere of sub­lime des­o­la­tion.

Just as movies like A Fist­ful of Dol­lars or Djan­go are root­ed in a cer­tain con­cep­tion of the sec­ond half of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, so Aster­oid City is root­ed in a cer­tain con­cep­tion of the mid­dle of the twen­ti­eth. This comes through most clear­ly in the archi­tec­ture of their sets.

“The thing was to try to make build­ings that were as evoca­tive of the time as we pos­si­bly could,” Ander­son says in the short mak­ing-of video above. But this thor­ough­ly mid­cen­tu­ry-provin­cial set­ting also need­ed its mys­te­ri­ous ele­ments: the crater, of course, but also the obser­va­to­ry and “the free­way on-ramp there that goes to nowhere.” The ful­ly assem­bled Aster­oid City felt like not just a set, but some­thing approach­ing an actu­al place: “Once it was built, we could be a tiny group in this what seemed like an aban­doned town.”

Any­one who’s spent enough time road-trip­ping across the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca will rec­og­nize that, con­ti­nen­tal loca­tion notwith­stand­ing, Aster­oid City cap­tures some­thing essen­tial about that coun­try’s more remote set­tle­ments, inhab­it­ed or not, locat­ed in arid regions or oth­er­wise. This required the fab­ri­ca­tion of not just build­ings but the flo­ra, fau­na, and geo­log­i­cal for­ma­tions of an entire land­scape, prac­ti­cal­ly all of it adher­ent to Ander­son­’s sig­na­ture hand­made aes­thet­ic scheme, which some­how con­vinces through arti­fi­cial­i­ty. Even detrac­tors of Ander­son­’s work sure­ly derive plea­sure from the result­ing qual­i­ty of sheer phys­i­cal­i­ty, some of which also owes to his still shoot­ing on good old 35-mil­lime­ter film — as this video’s pub­lish­er, Kodak, does­n’t hes­i­tate to remind us.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Wes Ander­son Uses Minia­tures to Cre­ate His Aes­thet­ic: A Primer from His Mod­el Mak­er & Prop Painter

Wes Ander­son Movie Sets Recre­at­ed in Cute, Minia­ture Dio­ra­mas

Wes Ander­son Explains How He Writes and Directs Movies, and What Goes Into His Dis­tinc­tive Film­mak­ing Style

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Revis­its Aban­doned Movie Sets for Star Wars and Oth­er Clas­sic Films in North Africa

A Star Wars Film Made in a Wes Ander­son Aes­thet­ic

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.