So far you've been in two movies with two top directors, Bertolucci and Antonioni. In most movies these days, women are just decoration. He'll care more than someone who was just paid to direct a story. I've had offers for a lot more money, but this project is by a director who's young and ready and wrote the screenplay himself. The story's so good, I want to make the film.
It's about a girl growing up in South Africa a century ago, and finding herself, and learning how to rely on herself. Paul Kohner said you were reading a screenplay based on "The Story of an African Farm."Ī. But I love to act, and here is the place to come for the movies. All they talk about is their look, their hair and their screwing. Americans have a thing about Southern California. I lived in France about three years, traveling around a lot, and then I tried London, and about six months ago I settled on here. It was getting hard to breathe in Europe - it's too compact, too compressed. She wore faded denims, smoked frequently, looked thinner and more intriguing than in "Tango," and seemed ready to revise her European image.Ī. This interview, conducted in Kohner's office, is her first in the United States. She moved to America signed with Paul Kohner (the legendary agent who represents Ingmar Bergman, Liv Ullmann and many other Europeans), turned down several big film offers, and moved into a house in the Hollywood hills. The film was "The Passenger," and this time her screen image was altogether different: She was quiet, intelligent, even sweet. And then she made a film with another of Europe's top directors, Michelangelo Antonioni, and another major star, Jack Nicholson.
She gave shocking interviews, she walked off a movie set and had herself committed to an asylum with the woman she described as her lover, she seemed to be surrounded by scandal. Maria Schneider quickly became the favorite "bad girl" of the movie press. Most of the film involved just two actors, and Schneider held her own with Brando in a stunning confrontation with sex and death. The girl was Maria Schneider, a 20-year-old with an innocent face, a woman's body and an electrifying presence. The man was Marlon Brando, long acknowledged as the finest screen actor of his generation. LOS ANGELES-It was, said the critic Pauline Kael, perhaps the most important artistic event since the first performance of Stravinsky's "The Rites of Spring." She was referring to the 1973 premiere of "Last Tango in Paris," a film by Bernardo Bertolucci which dealt in explicit detail with a brief affair between a middle-aged man and a girl barely out of her teens. Or an imprint of their fugitive state of mind. Or perhaps it's a flash-forward to a memory they'll cling to for the rest of their lives. So, the whole film could be seen as a flashback - a noir convention that emphasizes the forces of fate, since the ending of "their story" (even if we don't know what it is) has already been determined from the opening shot. We soon discover that, at the point the title appears, the boy and the girl have yet to meet. The man who would later direct "Rebel Without a Cause" establishes them as innocents and outsiders, star-crossed lovers who "were never properly introduced to the world we live in." Dissolve to an aerial shot of a truck barreling through a dusty wasteland. The shot seems to exist out of time - perhaps an idealized moment they once shared, or would never have. "They Live By Night" is a prototypical young-couple-on-the-run movie ("You Only Live Once," "Gun Crazy," "Bonnie and Clyde," "Badlands"), and this tabloid-style opening sets it up breathlessly. They smile, they kiss, and then something off-screen (and unheard on the soundtrack, though signaled by an jarring shift in the musical score) causes them to react with fear and alarm. An attractive young couple (Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell) are nestling in close-up by the flickering light of a fireplace. Nicholas Ray's directorial debut, "They Live By Night" (1949), begins like a trailer and then slams us right into the opening titles of the feature.