"Million Dollar Movie", Michael Powell

Michael Powell (1905-1990) was a British filmmaker, for many the most important one right after Alfred Hitchcock (for whom he worked as a still photographer), and a big influence on the movie brats generation, namely in Scorsese and Coppola. His first films as a director were quota-quickies, that is, about one-hour films made with modest resources and quickly, in order to force exhibitors to show more British films and to stimulate the national film industry. It was in 1937 that he made his first major film (as he himself defines it in his memoirs), The Edge of the World, a film of pictorial beauty and rural mysticism, filmed on the island of Foula, where the wind in the local vegetation and the clouds in the sky shape and reflect the turbulence of the characters' emotions. Such pastoral visuals would be repeated in at least three of the best films he signed with Emeric Pressburger, A Canterbury Tale, I Know Where I'm Going!, and Going to Earth.

It is by the films he made with him that he is most remembered. Powell met Pressburger on the production of The Spy in Black, and after working on two more films together, they decided to form the company The Archers. In their films, Pressburger wrote the first draft of the screenplay (which he later discussed with Powell), Powell directed the finished script, and they both produced the film. Some of their most notable and remembered works are The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Pressburger's favorite), A Matter of Life and Death (Powell's favorite, whose American title was rebaptized to Stairway to Heaven), Black Narcissus (“that rare thing, an erotic English film about the fantasies of nuns, ”as David Thomson put it), and The Red Shoes (a film about dying for art, something that Powell really believed). In these films, Pressburger's written eloquence is matched by Powell's romantic aesthetic, whose detailed imagination, use of color and perspective-oriented angles create visually rich films of a fantastic atmosphere and hybrid nature, where escapist fantasy and artificialism can cohabitate with the realism of its human stories.

In 1957 they ended their collaboration (although they reunited for two more films in the 1960s and 1970s) and pursued individual careers. Powell made yet another masterpiece, Peeping Tom, which would go back to The Red Shoes' theme of an obsession with an art form to the point of being willing to die (and kill, it’s a study of a psychotic mind) for it. Although it is now seen as a classic, it was so controversial at the time for its perverted character, and sexual and violent images that it ended Powell's career in England. The end of his filmic work would be made in Australia, and his last full-length feature film, the exotic The Age of Consent, although far from his best achievements, can still be visually dazzling and present interesting thoughts on the arts with all the inspirational and opportunistic relationships that they can create.

In his last years, Powell wrote his two-volume autobiography, A Life in Movies and Million Dollar Movie. They are friendly garrulous, barrier-free, and important records of the changes that the film industry went in the twentieth century since the time of silent films, told by someone who worked on it. They are full of anecdotal material featuring various characters such as Hitchcock, David Lean, Selznick, Orson Welles, but also creative solutions that reveal Powell's boldness, determination and creative genius at work in the various productions in which he was involved, as well as his own personal reflections on the medium. Million Dollar Movie is the second and last volume, describing Powell's career from the late 1940s until the late 1980s.

Excerpts:
"We decided to go ahead with David O. [Selznick] the way that hedgehogs made love: verrry carefully!"

"[On his collaboration with Emeric Pressburger] I had no ilusions which of the two of us had the finer mind. He was subtle, I was quick. Emeric used to say to me that when he started to expound a new idea, I would come to it, meet it, appropriate it, make it work, and by the time he had finished explaining it I would be coming to him, explaining it, improving it, and introducing it as my own."

"To Scope or not to Scope - that was the question in 1955."

"Directing is not just telling the actors what to do, it's responsibility, it's confidence, it's decision, it's command. All these qualities were in me from the beginning, and they will be in me until the end."

Link to the complete book in PDF:
https://mega.nz/#!ha503AyS!bPmjrNTDMNv6_jcjsz0jN9ry5c2jooaAEtS7bC-wHB8