"Another masterpiece about Sicily, another meditation on eternity, and an endlessly rich historical tapestry, meticulously composed in color and on 70 mm. Luchino Visconti based the picture on the Count Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s posthumously published novel, about a Sicilian prince at the time of the Italian unification, or Risorgimento, who steps away from power and influence because he realizes that the life he and his family have led is coming to an end, that he has to get out of the way for younger and more ambitious men like his nephew Tancredi. Visconti and his fellow screenwriters (there were four of them, including his frequent collaborators Suso Cecchi D’Amico and Enrico Medioli) took Lampedusa’s novel and fashioned a whole new work on a grand scale, an epic but of a very unusual type. Time itself is the protagonist of The Leopard: the cosmic scale of time, of centuries and epochs, on which the prince muses; Sicilian time, in which days and nights stretch to infinity; and aristocratic time, in which nothing is ever rushed and everything happens just as it should happen, as it has always happened. The landscapes, the extraordinary settings with their painstakingly selected objects and designs, the costumes, the ceremonies and rituals—it’s all at the service of deepening our sense of time and large-scale change, and the entire picture culminates in an hour-long sequence at a ball in which you can feel, through the eyes of the prince, an entire way of life (one that Visconti himself knew quite well) in the process of fading away. Like Contempt, The Leopard was initially overshadowed by the circumstances around it, namely, the casting of Burt Lancaster as the prince. Here in America, we saw the picture in a shortened and dubbed version (Lancaster was speaking English) that was a little unsatisfying: you could clearly see that the movie Visconti had intended wasn’t quite all there, and it was jarring to watch Lancaster speaking in his normal voice surrounded by Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale and Paolo Stoppa dubbed into American English. When I got to see the whole thing, I was astonished by the picture and by Lancaster, who gives all of himself to the role and to the world of the film. Visconti had wanted Laurence Olivier, and he was initially very curt with Lancaster, but the actor won him over and they became lifelong friends. I could go on and on about The Leopard. It’s a film that has become more and more important to me as the years have gone by."

"Since my films consist entirely of 16 mm urban landscapes and voice-over, I have always been fascinated by the many ways that other films utilize voice-over. Generally, I think the use of voice-over in film gets an unjustly bad rap. It is one of the most effective and evocative ways to connect the audience directly to a character. Both of these films incorporate innovative first-person monologue. While I admire My Dinner with André for its formal ambitiousness, I confess I don’t really enjoy the bulk of the film itself. But I love the opening and closing, especially the simple shots of New York City and Wallace Shawn’s concluding narration: “I treated myself to a taxi. I rode home through the city streets. There wasn’t a street, there wasn’t a building, that wasn’t connected to some memory in my mind. There, I was buying a suit with my father. There, I was having an ice cream soda after school. When I finally came in, Debbie was home from work. And I told her everything about my dinner with André.” Similarly, the best thing about Days of Heaven is the spectacularly quirky, poignant, complicated, and full-of-life narration by Linda (Linda Manz). Years ago, I had a phone call with the film’s executive producer and second unit director, Jacob Brackman, while I was researching the fabulous 1980 teen runaway adventure Times Square, for which he wrote the screenplay. I don’t recall how we got on the topic of his work on Days of Heaven, but I vividly remember him telling me about how the decision to introduce that voice-over as the primary storytelling vehicle arose out of Brackman and Malick’s realization when watching the dailies that the dramatic dialogue scenes weren’t working. They were in the middle of shooting and had the idea to save the film by sending out a second unit to shoot a ton of natural landscape B-roll and then adding voice-over to the footage. About a year after making Days of Heaven in May 1979, Brackman would go on to complete the screenplay for Times Square, a film that happens to bear an interesting resemblance to Malick’s story of a tough teenage girl with a heavy accent making her way in a hardscrabble environment. Days of Heaven’s Linda claims to be from Chicago, but her at times almost unintelligible accent sounds astoundingly similar to Robin Johnson’s Brooklynese in Times Square."

"Since my films consist entirely of 16 mm urban landscapes and voice-over, I have always been fascinated by the many ways that other films utilize voice-over. Generally, I think the use of voice-over in film gets an unjustly bad rap. It is one of the most effective and evocative ways to connect the audience directly to a character. Both of these films incorporate innovative first-person monologue. While I admire My Dinner with André for its formal ambitiousness, I confess I don’t really enjoy the bulk of the film itself. But I love the opening and closing, especially the simple shots of New York City and Wallace Shawn’s concluding narration: “I treated myself to a taxi. I rode home through the city streets. There wasn’t a street, there wasn’t a building, that wasn’t connected to some memory in my mind. There, I was buying a suit with my father. There, I was having an ice cream soda after school. When I finally came in, Debbie was home from work. And I told her everything about my dinner with André.” Similarly, the best thing about Days of Heaven is the spectacularly quirky, poignant, complicated, and full-of-life narration by Linda (Linda Manz). Years ago, I had a phone call with the film’s executive producer and second unit director, Jacob Brackman, while I was researching the fabulous 1980 teen runaway adventure Times Square, for which he wrote the screenplay. I don’t recall how we got on the topic of his work on Days of Heaven, but I vividly remember him telling me about how the decision to introduce that voice-over as the primary storytelling vehicle arose out of Brackman and Malick’s realization when watching the dailies that the dramatic dialogue scenes weren’t working. They were in the middle of shooting and had the idea to save the film by sending out a second unit to shoot a ton of natural landscape B-roll and then adding voice-over to the footage. About a year after making Days of Heaven in May 1979, Brackman would go on to complete the screenplay for Times Square, a film that happens to bear an interesting resemblance to Malick’s story of a tough teenage girl with a heavy accent making her way in a hardscrabble environment. Days of Heaven’s Linda claims to be from Chicago, but her at times almost unintelligible accent sounds astoundingly similar to Robin Johnson’s Brooklynese in Times Square."