From Paul Thomas Anderson to Joel and Ethan Coen, David Lynch to Woody Allen, these are the words of directors and their experiences making their first feature film.
Joel and Ethan Coen on Blood Simple
There’s something extremely satisfying in knowing that the director of The Evil Dead influenced two of the biggest art-house filmmakers of our time when they were trying to get their careers off the ground. (They also collaborated with Sam Raimi on Crimewave.) In My First Movie, the directors talked about how their Texas-set neo-noir film Blood Simple was conceived. It was the first time the directors worked on a professional set, but according to them, no one else there really knew what they were doing.
On choosing their story:
“JC: We wrote a little thing for Frank LaLoggia, one of the directors I was working for as an assistant editor; we wrote a screenplay with Sam Raimi. So we just sat down and thought what kind of movie could we make that was sort of producible on a really small budget like these horror movies, but that isn’t necessarily a horror film.
EC: The inspiration was these movies that Joel had been working on which had been done mostly by young people like us who didn’t have any credentials or credibility in the mainstream movie industry. But they’d gone out and raised money underground for their little exploitation movies, got the movies made and subsequently wandered into the place where Joel was working to have them cut. It was that evidence that it could be done that led us to try it ourselves: notably Sam’s movie, The Evil Dead, because Sam was the most forthcoming in sharing all his experience with us.”
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