This is fantastic. Um, you know...
it's such a great opportunity
to talk to a filmmaker that I've always admired so much.
I always said when I grew up I wanted to be you.
And now, even today I say, "When I grow up, I want to be you."
[Laughs]
'Cause I want to keep that energy and that passion
for movies,
and you just shoot back to back to back, you know?
And you've got such incredible taste
that just allows you to go from one film to another.
Yeah. The plan is that there is no plan.
Yeah, exactly.
And you mentioned when we were talking before we sat down here
about George Orwell and all that.
Sure.
And that reminded me of your...
really famous award-winning "1984"...
With Steve Jobs.
Yeah, the -- Yeah, the Apple commercial
with the girl with the hammer...
Yeah.
...and how that, first of all,
revolutionized what a TV advert could be.
Sure.
But it's just a beautiful little, you know, short film.
Well, you know, the courage of an agency.
The Chiat/Day were brand-new, hadn't got an account.
They had this account.
Mm-hmm.
They came to me. I was very big as a commercial maker.
And they gave me one sheet saying,
"Look, this is the thing."
I said, "Well, Apple? This is the Beatles."
He said, "No, no, no, no. Not the Beatles.
This is a guy called Steve Jobs."
"What does he make?" He says, "Computers."
I said, "For what? Household computers?
What, to write the shopping list?
What are you talking about?"
[Laughs]
How wrong I am.
And I said, "You know, how much does it cost?"
He said, "$2,500." I said, "Are you kidding?
It's too expensive."
[Laughs]
But I like it. It's fun because you never show the product,
and all you, at the end, say is "We're gonna show you,"
relying on the fact that people know what "1984" was.
Yeah.
Surprising how many people didn't know what it was.
It wouldn't work today because too many science fiction fans
only know their science fiction from movies and television
and their pop culture references,
video games and so on.
Um, they don't know it from the literary route.
Or they don't read.
We are today's novelists, if you like,
because the evolution of the film, in effect, is a book.
Yeah. Yeah.
And they vary in how good they are to how ordinary they are.
That's the way it goes in literature as well.
Mm-hmm.
So I'm hoping that we are replacing the book,
but it's a lazy way of getting information,
'cause you're sitting there.
You're not having to do this -- smell the page
and, you know, look at the cover.
Yeah.
You're just being fed information.
Is that good or bad? I don't know.
Well, you have literary roots to a number of your films.
Yes.
Like, "Blade Runner" comes from a Philip K. Dick novel,
"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"
Yeah.
Which most people don't remember.
The book is very -- 19 stories in the first 20 pages.
Yeah, exactly. He was all over the place.
And one of the problems is you've got to select that central story,
which Hampton did -- Fancher did.
Yeah.
And then off that -- I met Dick,
who said had read that I said off the side --
and you got to be careful what you say --
I said, "Geez, I couldn't get through the book."
He was furious, so to make amends,
I invited him to EEG one morning --
Doug Trumbull's place.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
"Listen, come and look at a couple of shots."
So I showed him the opening of the movie.
Yeah.
And he was absolutely blown away
and was quelled.
Good. Good.
I'm glad you made amends.
Became pretty friendly.
I'm glad you made amends.
And then, in my mind, what completed that package,
that experiential package for me as an audience member,
was just your pure cinema layered on top of that.
Mm-hmm.
You put us into that -- that world.
You felt the grit. You felt the rain in the streets.
You felt the crowding.
You know, all of that comes from just life and living,
'cause I'd done a lot of commercials
before any film -- a lot.
And in that time, it would take me to Hong Kong
prior to the first skyscraper ever being built in Hong Kong.
So I was working in the harbor on junks in the harbor.
There'd be 1,000 junks.
And the -- the Bank of Hong Kong was just about to be built,
so Hong Kong was a massive, medieval situation.
It was unbelievably stunning.
And they'd just discovered polystyrene.
So everything went out the window,
so the harbor was a floating collection of polystyrene.
Yeah.
And it was the future. That was dystopia.
Yeah.
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