Originally asked
The Paris Review, to novelists and poets, The Art of Fiction
A durable Art of Fiction question asked through named literary influences and artistic models.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
The Guardian, 15 July 2013 source ↗
Actually, I started falling in love with the films of Brian De Palma. He was the first filmmaker I ever loved, he always made genre films. They touched me more, they felt warm, and human, and unsettling. There was always his vision behind them.
I read Turgenev, Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons , and that book had a tremendous impact on me. It was about a young man who came back to the old village to visit the old people after he had graduated from his university, and he used to be a doctor, and falls in love with a beautiful woman and all that sort of thing. They lived out in the country. When I was writing my first novel, Catherine Carmier — I started writing it in ’58, I think, ’58, ’59 — I knew nothing about writing a novel, and I used that Fathers and Sons as sort of my Bible, my guide. My first novel was about a young man who had been away from the old place, and then returning, and falls in love with a beautiful girl, and he loses her. I was really very much impressed by — influenced by — Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons at that time, but then I started reading other books, of course. I was reading other books at the same time, but that was the book that had the earliest influence on my structure
Well absolutely Sondheim was an influence, because he was in many ways this door into the world of theater and he is a phenomenal composer. He’s also a phenomenal mentor.
Jim Lawson. Jim Lawson was an unbelievable human being. Born in Ohio. He was a pacifist. He studied Gandhi. He was part of the Methodist Student Movement. He lived in India. He became an organizer for FOR, the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
I often thought I was in the wrong business. I was pretty seriously thinking of tossing it in before I shot Shine.
It’s not sudden.
"The love you take is equal to the love you make" – Lennon/McCartney.
But, tough, I have fallen…flat before. You just get up and dust yourself off.
You now have to address the fact that we might live in so-called wealthy countries at the expense of people who live in poor countries. Our wealth is maybe dependent on somebody else from the poverty side of the equation, suffering on our behalf.
Yielding to the wrong sort of melancholia.
Niamh Cusack, Robert Wilson, Noah Baumbach, David Lynch, François Ozon, Marco Brambilla
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