Melville on Melville

Some random harvests from the great Melville on Melville: On his early films, Melville was often short of money and had to halt and resume filming as finances dictated -- reminiscent of David Lynch's filming of Eraserhead, and Ed Wood's of practically everything! (I love the fact that Wood's Night of the Ghouls didn't surface for a quarter-century because Wood couldn't pay the lab bill.)...Melville also shot in semi-documentary style in those early years, employing non-professionals who were often given "no idea what we were up to" -- the same method that Roger Corman employed in shooting The Intruder in small Southern towns...Melville said that "My dream is to make a colour film in black and white, in which there is only one tiny detail to remind us that we really are watching a film in colour." He just about pulled it off in Army of Shadows, which is easy to remember as being in black and white although it actually is in color. Director William Wellman and cinematographer William H. Clothier experimented successfully with the effect Melville describes in Track of the Cat (1954)...Melville's obsession with his hero Herman Melville's most difficult novel, Pierre or The Ambiguities, was taken up by later French director Leos Carax, who adapted the novel (sort of) as the supremely perplexing Pola X (Pola=Pierre ou Les Ambiguities; X=ten drafts of the script)...I like Melville's comment on "the superman side of every star. Top professionals...have a sure, unshakeable instinct for the right gesture. A star...is an ordinary person with something else extra." The other night, I watched the first episode of the 1990-1991 British television series Chancer, starring a young Clive Owen, and it was easy to see exactly what Melville meant: Owen's star quality, that "sure, unshakeable instinct for the right gesture," was utterly palpable. Something extra, indeed.