Since the earliest days of LWLies, we’ve been asking filmmakers to try to pinpoint the moment that they succumbed to the magnetic allure of moviemaking. For this 100th issue spectacular, join us on a journey through the formative years of 39 of our favourite directors from around the globe as they cast their minds back to the very beginning…
1. Lola Quivoron
DIRECTOR
Dreaming of Baltimore | 2016
Rodeo | 2022
When I was a child, I grew up in the suburbs. I would watch a lot of commercial movies, like Harry Potter and Spider-Man. I was not at all involved in any kind of cinephilia until I was about 17. My parents didn’t pass on to me a sense of patience. Nor did they give me what you’d call “cultural capital”. I discovered cinema – we’re talking classic movies – very late. In my hometown, I had this big gang. There were a lot of strong relationships between everyone. We were really close. Then my parents decided to move to the South of France. I wasn’t able to accept that gap that had been built away from my friends. I was so sad. In this new place, I was completely lost. I got depressed. It was a really dark period for me. I didn’t want to hang out with the other kids. I didn’t want to try and just recreate what I had before. So I decided to watch films.
At first it was in the library. It was in this small town near Bordeaux. I picked up lots of DVDs. It was a way to escape reality, but also to not escape reality. Then I discovered there was a cinema near to my place, and it was free for students from the local high school. I decided to go and watch every film that played. It was a small cinema, but I was lucky because one of my teachers saw what I was doing and he led me towards [French film and TV school] La Fémis. One day he spoke to me about this school, and I thought it sounded interesting. I was good in school. But my parents weren’t that interested in what I ended up doing. Thanks to my teacher, I was aware of preparatory school, which I went to, and then I applied to La Fémis.
The first classical movie I fell in love with was Rebel Without a Cause. It’s a film that’s stuck to me like glue. It’s with me all the time. And it’s a queer movie as well. James Dean has this father who dresses up like a 1950s housewife. It’s this perfect gay projection and a model for a lot of gay people. This film caused me to ask a lot of questions. In the film, James Dean wants to belong in this new high school but it’s really different to what he’s used to. Then you have this younger character who’s in love with James Dean. I love it, particularly its fascination with death and how to be an outcast.
2. Wes Anderson
DIRECTOR
The French Dispatch | 2021
Asteroid City | 2023
I would say the inspiration for me to make movies came when I was very young, though I don’t actually know the moment. I had a Super 8 camera probably when I was 10 or 11 and I thought about wanting to make movies then. I wanted to do theatre when I was a bit younger than that, so it’s certainly something I was searching for from a young age but I couldn’t say exactly when.
3. Kleber Mendonça Filho
DIRECTOR
Bacurau | 2019
Pictures of Ghosts | 2023
I don’t know exactly when I had an epiphany about wanting to make cinema, but I had a very interesting time in England when I went there with my mother and my brothers to live for a while. I had a lot of access to films in London. British television was quite good at the time, maybe it still is. Channel 4 was amazing, they made those films that did not feel like television at all, like My Beautiful Laundrette. It was quite an education. Then I went back to Brazil and, naturally, technology caught up. I got a video camera, and that’s the camera I used for the footage you see in Pictures of Ghosts. It’s a very simple camera, but I still like the funky aspect of the footage. I was a mediocre football player, so I never had any dreams of doing that. I was good at writing but not good at maths, so I ruled out anything that would lead to engineering or science. I was left with the desire to make films and write, and I used journalism as a cushion because I felt it was a real profession. I wasn’t aware that it didn’t pay very well but I worked as a journalist for many years. I was always thinking about making and writing about films. Now, I am going back to some of the stuff I wrote. I took a very deep breath because I was afraid of discovering some horrible articles and interviews I did, but I also discovered some things I quite like from 25 years ago. I wrote professionally as a film critic, which is still something I remember very fondly. I was trying to change cinema as a film critic and it did not work. I wasn’t making the films that I wanted to make, so I was writing about the films that I thought should be defended. I also took apart the films that I didn’t think should exist, which is not something I would do today. I think I have gotten more mellow as I have gotten older.
4. Ben Rivers
DIRECTOR
Two Years at Sea | 2011
Krabi, 2562 | 2019
I’m not sure there was just one epiphany. It’s very hard actually to pin it down to a single moment. I was thinking, was it the video shop in the basement of the church I used to go to? Or the fact that we had this massive Hamlyn book of movies. We wouldn’t watch TV much when I was growing up – we grew up in the countryside and didn’t go to the cinema. There was no cinema nearby. I definitely wasn’t one of those kids sneaking off to the movies, you know, like you hear many filmmakers talking about. It was more like watching Video Nasties from the video shop in the basement of the church.
My mum had this amazing Hamlyn book, a huge tome about movies. It was amazing. I just remember poring over this book for hours and hours and only looking at stills, and sort of imagining the films from the little descriptions. I would get lost in the filmmaking without actually watching the films. There was one particular still of Herostratus by Donald Levy that I loved. It’s a British film. Amazing film, really crazy. That still, I kept going back to it because I just couldn’t work it out. I think it’s a projection of an image onto a person, but it’s probably the first avant garde image I’d ever seen. I think that might have been one tiny epiphany. But the horror film thing, that was really important too. They’re the reason why I went to art school was because, back then, I wasn’t thinking about making films – I wanted to make special effects for films. You know, like heads exploding. I loved David Cronenberg. I didn’t think, ‘Oh, I can make films like David Cronenberg.’ I thought, ‘I could blow up heads, and create, like… flesh.’
I also don’t want to forget to mention Derek Jarman. He definitely was a big inspiration early on. When I left art school I’d made one film, this sort of Jekyll and Hyde film with my friends killing each other. And then my second film was actually kind of commissioned by Derek Jarman, which I haven’t really talked about much because I can’t actually find the film. It’s somewhere in storage. One day it’s gonna come out. He was having a show at Newlyn Art Gallery. This was during the last year of his life, so these were his last paintings, and he said, ‘I’m going to take the top floor, and I’d love some recent graduates from Falmouth University to do installations or whatever they want on the bottom floor responding to my paintings.’ Me and four or five friends, we were the only ones who knew Derek’s work, and were really excited about it. So we obviously volunteered and we did all these installations, and I made my second film which is a Super 8 film shot on a Nizo. We had this meeting with him and I was a really big fan and I said, ‘I’m going to make a film,’ and he said, ‘Oh, you can have one of my cameras. I’m not gonna need it any more.’ And I just started crying.
Then about a week or so after that, I got this mysterious phone call. I don’t know who it was, a gallerist or somebody, saying very apologetically that they had to keep the camera for the archives. It’s very understandable, even though I feel like he would have preferred for it to be used, because that’s the kind of person he was. But I think they might have helped me buy one.
5. Patricio Guzmán
DIRECTOR
The Battle of Chile | 1975-79
| 2010
