Daisuke Akasaka talks about Road to nowhere and the year 2011 composed by Hirotaka Nakayama (for Trash Up magazine)

Film critic Daisuke Akasaka talks about Monte Hellman's Road to nowhere, as well as Sam Peckinpah, Wes Craven, Nicholas Ray, Glauber Rocha, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, Shintaro Katsu, and Robert Altman...and about how films documents the times, the systems, and the personalities of the filmmakers, while reflecting on 2011, a year in which so many things happened in Japan, including a major earthquake and a nuclear power plant explosion.

A film that is the culmination of a life's work

Road to Nowhere is a film about "making a film". Last year in Japan, there were films screened that were somewhat like the culmination of a filmmaker's life, and I don't know why. Wes Craven's Scream 4: The Next Generation was like a film theory film, as was Glauber Rocha's A Idade da terra/The Age of the Earth and Nicholas Ray's We Can't Go Home Again.
I've summarized them as " culmination films," but I think there are two kinds of cases: one is when the film was made intentionally, and the other is when it was made without any purpose. In the case of Glauber Rocha and Nicholas Ray, they shot their films in a way that made you wonder, "When is it going to end?" and in the case of Nicholas Ray, the film was not completed. In the case of Monte Hellman and Wes Craven, they are making sure to end their films properly. It's a given that there is a beginning and an end. Monte Hellman, in particular, is a man of professionalism and craftsmanship who has to finish what he starts. Nicholas Ray probably couldn't work without a Hollywood-like system. He is more of an artist-type person, and he is a director that lacks the basic idea of delivering a work that has been started. But the difference is that Rocha and Nicholas Ray's films were made in the 1970s, while Road to nowhere and Scream 4 are more recent films. Wes Craven started his career in the 1970s, and Monte Hellman started his career in the late 1960s, but his style is very 1970s. They are not exactly the films of the generation that had to end in minutes and minutes of program picture time.

Monte Hellman's timelessness

Road to Nowhere is written by Steven Gaydos, but according to an interview with Herman himself, it originally began as a project to adapt Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel The House of Pleasure for the Hong Kong shooting project in 1964. He wanted to make a film that told the story not in a linear fashion, but in a novel-like time frame, but in the end it was cancelled. He said that he was more influenced by Alain Resnais' Stavisky than Robbe-Grillet's narrative method(1), but it seems that he had been working on this idea for a long time. The way the story is told, it would have been impossible to make it in the usual American production style, so I thought it would be possible to complete it in a very low-budget film that would have to be shot digitally. In the sense that we had to make a new film using the new technology available at that time, and since it was no longer possible to make a major motion picture, we had no choice but to do it this way. As for Ray's film, it was impossible for a commercial film, much less an American film, to have four projections on one screen, and while it was possible on the level of an experimental film, the fact that Nicholas Ray was doing it was in itself quite "eh! , It would have been a "What? Well, I wonder how much of what Nam June Paik did was new at the time. ......
Both Monte Hellman and Nicholas Ray used new technology to do things they had never done before in their lives, and I think it is important to know what the times were like when they were shooting their films. Road to nowhere is not necessarily a film within a film. In the last scene, when the camera swoops around, you can see the real film crew filming the cameraman. At that moment, the story of documentary and fiction is rehashed. The film burning at the end of Two-Lane Blacktop could be the same thing. American films spend a lot of money to establish a fiction, and they are not allowed to show the outside of the fiction. Of course, there are cases where they use NG cuts in comedies as a joke. Still, if you think of it as an attempt to go outside the fiction of the film, that last scene makes a lot of sense. Monte Hellman's films never get old, like Two-Lane Blacktop. I think The Shooting would be a better choice for a double feature with Road to nowhere. The Shooting, in which Warren Oates plays two roles, is actually just a negative reversal, but that's the same as the last one in Two-Lane Blacktop or Road to nowhere, showing outside of the fiction.
Iguana is especially great. It's a very Griffith-like, profound film...... but it's over in 90 minutes. Silent Night, Deadly Night 3: Better Watch Out! seems to have been made as a commissioned film, but his filmmaking style of "abstraction" is consistent. It's funny to say this, but I feel that Hellman's film is a typical example of a filmmaker who tries to make an abstract film without being involved in the era as much as possible, but the imprint of the era is definitely left in the film. There is a scene in which we see films made in 35mm on DVD, and that act itself is an example of how we should look at films made in 2010.
In the past, there have been films with scenes of people going to see films, but they were either seen in theaters or on video, but now they are seen on disc. Perhaps the DV format makes it even more of a record of the lifestyle of the era in which the film was made. In a paradoxical sense, this film shows that although Hellmann has moved away from the industry, he has no need to make this film now, or to make it because of the earthquake, or for any other reason, without falling into thematism, it still has the imprint of its time, and that is what film is about. A film has the aspect of documenting the system in which it was made. Road to nowhere is a story of a film that is being made, a story of the system of making the film, and the film itself is a record of the times.

The era of failure films

If the number of films directed by a director becomes one every 10 years or so, it seems as if we are going to end up like this. In fact, there are many people who have already finished their careers, and there are many people who only made one film, so it is a miracle that they are still making films. There are many uncredited films that Hellman had participated in, but karate films such as Shutter is also interesting. Speaking of karate films, you were also involved in the editing of The Killer Elite. Peckinpah and Monte Hellman have in common that they tried to show the outside of the film in a Brechtian way in American films. In Cross of Iron, the first boy to be killed comes out at the end. In The Killer Elite, the director tried to make an ending in which the murdered fellow gets up and says, "I don't understand," but the producer also said, "I don't understand," and it was cut. The director himself thought it was a playful film, but people around him did not allow it.
In an interview with Monte Hellman at the time, he said, "I was waiting in the editing room, and Sam came in, already drunk and stoned, and I was trying hard to catch what he was saying in his mumbling voice. It was a great idea, and Sam came up with a genius idea in his drunken state, which I would never have thought to cut back to the karate scene at the airport and the CIA planning their strategy." He also said that when he had Peckinpah on for one scene in China 9 Liberty 37, he couldn't remember the dialogue, he didn't do what he said he was going to do, and he's glad it was done in one day(1). But there are a lot of Peckinpah studies who don't like Monte Hellman. In the DVD secondary audio of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, the studies are talking about how Peckinpah changed a lot of things in Rudolf Wurlitzer's script, and they are all on the same side, saying, "You'll never make a movie with that script." He says, "He worked with Monte Hellman on 'Two Lane Blacktop,' didn't you remember?" In short, The Wild Bunch is the supreme priority, and all the others are regarded as failures. But when I look at The Wild Bunch now, I'm not sure if I can call it a success. The shooting scenes were shot in a very long time, and that in itself is groundbreaking, but I doubt if it is connected to the film as a whole. But that's the great thing about it, so everyone forgives it. The secondary audio of DVD Major Dundee is one example of people saying, "This is a failure. Peckinpah didn't understand that a big film requires moving from one location to the next, so he had to limit the number of locations to one or two to make filming more difficult, so everyone had to keep moving, just like in a regular movie, and it was a big problem because the budget went over." But he's talking on the premise that it's a "failure," so everyone seems to be having a pretty good time. That's a good part of it. I don't think it necessarily has to be a finished, great film. I started off by saying "a film that is the culmination of one's life," but when you think about the life of an artist, "masterpiece supreme" doesn't work. No one makes perfect masterpieces all the time. Especially in the 1970s, auteurs were in a situation where they could not make such perfect films. People who have seen movies that made a lot of money and produced a lot of masterpieces are the base of today's filmmaking and film criticism, but the golden age of real money lasted only a few years. Hollywood was at its peak from the end of the 1930s to the 1950s, when the U.S. was not attacked during World War II, and in the last 100 years the quality has been declining. I don't think this kind of thing can be called an industry. It would be strange from a capitalist point of view, wouldn't it? It is strange to judge other periods based on the period when the perfect work was created. Once a film is recognized as a masterpiece, it is treated as a failure due to insufficient budget or insufficient shooting time, except for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, and then it is made in 16mm. Nowadays, only the richest big companies or bourgeois or a few people can shoot in 35mm. In Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, films shot on 35mm are rarely entered in film festivals anymore. Only France, I think. That is a very special country. Even the subsidies are for selling art, so they are very good at making a business out of it. It's just foolish to think of it as a standard. I digress a little, but there is an interesting story.
Raul Ruiz passed away last year, and there was an article(2) in which he talked with film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who said, "Since the beginning of the 2000s, the big-budget films you have made become boring". Ruiz said that until the 1980s, France had a right-wing government, but there were institutions like the INA (Institute National d'Audiovisual) that would lend money under the guise of something, even if they didn't know how the film was going to turn out. Even films that were shot in three days with a minimum budget could be shot freely without any interference. However, after Mitterrand came to power, the subject matter was limited under the guise of "culture," and the content, date, and details were also decided. They say that they have no choice but to make films whose budgets and number of days are determined by the subject matter. The French have created a system whereby they can make a small amount of money even with boring films by researching awards and selling them to film festivals. I have decided not to watch such films anymore. In the case of the U.S., there is a structure in place to suck up people who come out as independent filmmakers. On the other hand, Coppola moved to the independent film industry, but he didn't make any films in the US. There are only a few directors who have been able to go outside the Hollywood system and continue making films. Orson Welles and Samuel Fuller both made very cheap films out of Hollywood system, and it is hard to say that they were able to achieve the quality they wanted. In the 1970's, they had no budget or no technicians, so they made trashy or incomplete films. It was a question of what you could do with minimal money, and sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. Ed Wood was such a classic example. In the 70's, people like Jess Franco and Jean Rollin came out, and from the interviews I read, they were trying to make legitimate films, but why did they end up making films like that? They had talent, but if you ask me what kind of talent they had, all I can say is, "This is the kind of talent they have". There are so many films that have been trashed for various reasons. These films have something interesting about them, and now everyone enjoys them, but there are plenty of films that cost a lot of money but are nowhere near as interesting as they used to be. When there is no middle ground between the two extremes of films that can and cannot spend a lot of money, there are no more interesting failures. There are films that should not have been made into films at the scenario stage. With film, because it is expensive, it is difficult to reshoot like it is with digital, and films are made that are edited incorrectly or are not connected. In an age where everything can be made mechanically, it is more difficult to preserve personal taste than it is with film. It is certainly more difficult to preserve a personal taste than it was with film.

Images with a sense of distance

But there is already too much footage for one person to consume. The transition from VHS to DVD was progressing during the period when people like Tarantino came out, and at that time, there were many films that had not been made into software that were now being made into software, so I think there was a joy in discovering and bringing them out into the world. Now we know it's impossible to see everything, and even if someone reports, "I found it! But nowadays, people know it's impossible to see everything, and even if you report that you've found something, they'll say, "We're busy finding things, too. Only the experts will be able to see them, but even they can only rank the works, and then they will wonder what to do with what they have found, and they will say, "What's the use? What is the use? We can classify them as much as we want, but we don't know what they mean to us or to our audiences anymore. From my point of view, I have no idea where they are going, and there is a lot of film criticism that doesn't have a clear idea of how to relate to the classics. The way we handle images in general, in short, the way we shoot, file, and process them, is rapidly spreading, and I feel that the system of making films in studios and showing them in movie theaters has become disconnected. There are VHS films that have not been released on DVD yet, but they are now on Blu-ray, TVs are going terrestrial digital and 3D, but they are not selling well, and the people who make the hardware are going berserk. The old man or children in the street is not going to be bothered by so many more pixels. Digitalization of movie theaters is also a hot topic, and I think it is a dividing line in the entertainment industry, but I don't think this is something that can be solved within the industry. People in Japan, who are not involved in the film industry, are living their lives using images and sound, or rather, images and sound, and whether or not they consider it natural to use this as an industry or a source of business is, strangely enough, not considered in Japan. I don't think the politicians are thinking at all about what to do with their image as an image. But I think it's the same on the theater side. So even when we talk about digital issues, from the outside it sounds like you are just trying to survive and you are talking about vested interests. But if the system continues to taper off, I think there will be more and more films that will not be made into software, and at that time, people may return to the trend of screening films. I don't know what will happen. It is precisely because we are in a period of transition to digital film that the question of "What was 35mm like? What was 35mm like? Eric Rohmer said, "16mm is good because the images are blurred." The blurred images create a distance from reality, which is certainly an element that preserves and protects the fictional nature of the images. Rohmer also said that "too clear images are dangerous because they make it impossible to maintain a distance," and that's what's happening now. We have been shown images of tsunamis and earthquakes in high-definition and other vivid digital images to the point of being sick and tired of them. Even if the quality of the images is still poor, they will become clearer and clearer as soon as the manufacturers make them widely available in the region. That is why we have to let the images create a certain distance now, and the artists who are able to create it are excellent. If all you want to do is to make people feel a certain sense of discomfort or to make them feel amused, he or she is no better than someone like Sion Sono, and it's not worth watching.

Connecting these issues to Road to nowhere, Monte Hellman once talked about Jacques Rivette's Paris nous appartient(3). Rivette would film people coming into a room, the beginning of a play, and the end of it all the way through. In a normal commercial film, there is a time when nothing is happening, which would have been cut off and discarded, but he films it in connection with the time when something is happening. Usually, people only see a part of an event that becomes information, not the whole thing that is happening there. It is very difficult to keep watching the whole story in a fiction film, because American films tend to cut out the parts that are not necessary. However, it can be said that this way of filming creates a sense of distance that is different from the images we normally see. (Robert Kramer also talked about the realism of Rivette's films in an interview about The Edge in Cahiers du Cinema No. 205. In other words, Paris nous appartient has shocked two of the most radical of American indies.)　In short, "Road to nowhere" was an Alain Resnais-like script, yet the resulting film was closer to Rivette's. Alain Resnais is not a director who places importance on the time of filming itself, but Rivette places tremendous importance on the actual time of filming, so this was the best film for me to judge which side Monte Hellman was on. With Alain Resnais, the conversation goes on and on, but only the scene shifts, but if you follow the sound, you can follow the story. In the case of Rivette's films, the idea is to retain the time of everything that happens in a scene. In the case of "Road to nowhere," the film is made like a puzzle, but the sense of time in which the scene itself was shot is maintained, giving the film a strong documentary feel. That is interesting. I think Apichatpong Weerasethakul also reconstructed real-time continuity in Blissfully Yours, but after that he went in a fragmentary/minimal direction.

-- You mentioned Scream 4 at the beginning.

I appreciated the film. I just think Wes Craven would have been better to write it on paper. It's like he made a film about his theory of horror films. But it's about the relationship between media and cinema today. The killer uses all kinds of media to "become famous," but the fact that he has to shoot on a recording medium is a very modern idea, and although it appears in other Hollywood films, I don't think it has been done so clearly. But I don't feel like he's betting on the images he's shooting now. He's not taking cuts that can't be made without this shot. At least not like the one scene/one cut in the first Scream where the male-female couple invites the heroine to a party. I think Wes Craven himself is an artist whose consistency could be felt if he did a retrospective somewhere or something and reviewed it.

-- I think Claude Chabrol was one of the most retrospectively acclaimed filmmakers in Japan last year.

Merci pour le chocolat, Rien ne va plus, and La Fleur du mal are among the most well-made films in the French film industry? Rien ne va plus is a film that is very well made, as one would expect from Chabrol. It’s like a combination of Bob le flambeur and Rough Cut. I wonder why they let him go at the end. When you see Merci pour le chocolat, it reminds you of "milk" from The Suspicion and Notorious, doesn't it? There is a cut where the drinks are switched or carried, but there is no cut where the sleeping pills are laced. In La Fleur du mal, Suzanne Flon's character is having nightmares about her father's murder, which is shown only briefly in the opening scene, but the film is finished with only her voice. The scene where she confesses after the murder, "I killed my father too a long time ago," comes alive, and the part where she atones for her crime is also a tear-jerker. Suzanne Flon plays a high-class prostitute in Mr. Arkadin, and that film is also about erasing the past. Chabrol is a director of French Nouvelle Vague, so he has a history of cinema to refer to. The people who are making films today are saving the classics, and that is what the Nouvelle Vague is all about.
But we don't know until the very end whether it was the father who wrote the mysterious letter or not. The children insist, but they don't know because the father is killed. Chabrol doesn't give us information on every point. So what's interesting is the end of La femme infidèle. Stéphane Audran drops a photo from Michel Bouquet's suit, and it shows Maurice Ronet, his missing lover. In the next cut, she burns the photo. Then we meet her son and Michel Bouquet in the garden, and a detective comes from the other side. Michel bouquet says something like "I love you" and then goes to the detective. That's when we get to the unfamiliar zoom-and-dolly cut of the example, where they are moving away from each other but getting closer to each other. You don't know what's going on in this scene if you're watching it seriously. It seems to me that they burned Maurice Ronet's picture because they realized that Bouquet had murdered Ronet and hidden the body, and they wanted to hide the evidence because it would be bad if the detectives came to them, but they didn't say so. Bouquet and the detectives are also talking in the distance, so we can't hear them, and we don't know why the detectives got the evidence or even if the body was found, and if Bouquet did have a notion, we don't know why. In contrast to Fritz Lang's Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, which Chabrol often cites as a lean masterpiece, and to the most contemporary The Eye of Vichy, I think he even leaves the ambiguity of the images to the audience like Raul Ruiz. In La Fille coupée en deux, the bourgeois family is initially portrayed as a creepy bunch, in the usual Chabrol style, but then he tries to capture the good parts of them, and in the end, they become pitiful people. They used to be only creepy parts, but maybe they have changed their ways... Like the early Les Cousins, it's just the two of them, but in La Fille coupée en deux Chabrol is trying to portray other characters as well. That's what Clint Eastwood does, too. When he does routines for roles he's starred in, he's taken the parts where he could only film the bad guys as bad guys, and now that he's a director, he's spending more than time trying to delve into them. You were able to delve into characters that were just side characters in Changeling. I don't think he would have been able to depict the meeting between Angelina Jolie and the death row inmates in the past.
However, in Merci pour le chocolat and Rien ne va plus, I think Isabelle Huppert overdid it. Isabelle Huppert is the type of actress who has her own style and shows that style, but in this Chabrol's film, there is never anything more than the style. I don't know if it's because Chabrol had a heart problem or what, but I feel like she doesn't push herself so much anymore, and maybe it's because it's her later films. But that's not something to criticize.

-- You think the physical condition and condition of the filmmaker does affect the film?

That's how films are made, especially before the digital age, when you have to use big cameras and other equipment, and it costs a lot of money. There are many cases where a film did not work out, or where a film did work out, and I think it is a very important element to think about the topic, "Why did this film turn out the way it did? Because the film itself is also a record. That there were certain conditions, that's the interesting part. It is a really important factor, and I think it will become more and more important in the future, because films are not always shot under the same conditions.
As cameras and recording equipment become smaller and smaller, and it becomes easier and easier to shoot, various conditions will emerge, such as "I didn't shoot this footage with the intention of making a film, but I connected it together later," or "I shot this cut for this film, but I stopped and put it in another film," etc. I think. Sooner or later, you will have to consider the conditions of a film shot by one person or two people. It is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish who shot a certain video, so when it comes time to make a work of art, what the video was shot for, the ability of each person who shot it, their way of thinking, what they did, etc., will be very important factors in the final work. I think the sense of the person filming will be closer to that of jazz and music people. Whether the film was shot as a soloist, a duo, a trio, or a quartet, such a division is more important than whether it is documentary or fiction, or whether it was made to be faked or not. But that doesn't mean that we should be picking on who shot the footage.

-- What other films released in Japan have left a lasting impression on you?

When I saw Antokino inoichi/Life back then (Takahisa Zeze), there was a scene where he says his lines in front of a busy highway, and another scene where he says his lines on a beach while being interrupted by the sound of the ocean. I was a little moved by the fact that the recording technology has developed so much. These two scenes were good. The TV series of Zatoichi shot by Shintaro Katsu was badly recorded, but that was because the simultaneous recording technology of Japanese films at that time was poor. The recording itself was out of standard because it was made at a time when television did not have simultaneous recording, which means that the level of simultaneous recording for television at that time was recorded as such. In that sense, what Katsu and Tai Kato did (along with the imperfection of Shinji Somai's unstable tracking shot in 1980s) has documentary value in terms of the limitations of that era. That and the desire to go see a regular action movie. I saw Drive Angry 3D. It's the kind of story that's being put on in a shack in the middle of nowhere. They spent all that money and only collected about $20 million. That's not good. But Nicolas Cage looked happy. When he said he wanted to do a scene where he gets hit in the eye with a bow and arrow and still lives, the producer said, "No! I read the script this time, and when I saw the scene, I knew I had to do it. This time, when he read the script, there was a scene in which he was shot in the eye with a gun, so he decided to do it immediately. Also, when he was reading Whitman's Leaves of Grass during filming, he found the phrase "drinking from the skull" and said, "I want to do that!"(5) I thought it would be fun in Bad Lieutenant, and I thought it would be fun in Kick-Ass, too. But I think that's a bad thing!! Kick-Ass should not be shown to boy and soldiers who have no visual education. To be frank, it's terrible to involve children in this film. I wonder if Nicolas Cage is thinking about it ethically. But the scene where the child plays an active role is a good, and the scene where he uses the strobe was also good. I see that Altman's Nashville was also re-released last year. Like Nicholas Ray, this is a film that seeks pluralism, rather like the attempts by Renoir and Tati to do multiple elements in a single screen. Audiences at the time, of course, could not follow such multiple performances, so both Le Regle du Jeu and Playtime were box-office flops, and Altman's films are being revived once more in a 1970s variation on that theme. To put it bluntly, it's a genre film. But you can't hire that many people for this kind of endeavor anymore, and now that audiences are becoming more and more manipulated, they can only see one piece of information, one performance, on one screen. Altman is well-received by some, and among the filmmakers (Jean-Marie) Straub and Rivette have mentioned it. When Kubrick died, Straub went out of his way to mention Altman's name, saying, "Altman is far superior to Kubrick. Altman's experiment in the 1950s to see how far he could take a low-budget play and make it into a movie can be seen as an experiment connected to Orson Welles' Macbeth. I think The Secret Honor and Come back to the five and dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean are extremely important films nowadays, but I don't think they will ever be shown in cinemas in Japan properly again.

-- Looking back on the films released in Japan in 2011, how was it?

Looking at the list of films released last year, it seems like you are picking up films by directors of the 1950s, films by people of post-Nouvelle Vague. In that sense, I guess I was thankful. After all, I think the tsunami and the nuclear power plant influenced on us. That's how I feel about it. I really don't know what's going to happen next anymore. It's a new theme for the documentarists. All Japanese people are involved, and now there is a new subject. Originally, Japanese documentaries themselves were subject oriented, but I thought that films that appealed emotionally by concealing the film medium itself because it was everyone's subject were the worst kind of film, and I came to dislike documentaries because I disliked that kind of thing. I'm the kind of person who dislikes documentaries. I've been trying to avoid watching such films as much as possible, but now my thematism is back. There seems to be no room for improvement for the time being.
But it was a good year for films after 311. We Can't Go Home Again, The Age of the Earth, Nashville. And Road to nowhere? The chaotic atmosphere of all of these films feels right when you see them now. I think it fits the current situation in Japan.

(from "Monte Hellman's Road to nowhere & Two-Lane Blacktop" in Trash Up! Magazine 2011)

(1)https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/collaborators-war-stories-and-roads-not-taken-an-interview-with-monte-hellman

(2)Please refer to the interview in Sam Peckinpah: Man of Iron (1993)

(3)https://jonathanrosenbaum.net/2023/10/trying-to-catch-up-with-raul-ruiz-a-conversation-with-jonathan-rosenbaum/

(4)The Last Great American Picture Show New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, Amsterdam University Press, January 2021, p166

(5)https://movies.radiofree.com/interviews/driveang_nicolas_cage.shtml