"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."

"You asked for albums, but albums are already a bit away from pop because of they're a more serious proposition, so all of these are albums that I own on vinyl, and because I'm of a certain age that's what I think of as a record. We didn't have a big record collection in our house when I was growing up, but my mum had three Beatles albums, Sgt Pepper, Revolver and Abbey Road. Even though I was a kid I could tell that Sgt Pepper and Revolver sounded like music that had happened a while ago, but Abbey RoadM sounded more modern. It still does sound quite modern, because on second side where all the songs run into each other, that's quite a thing, not many people had done that since and not many have since. There's an art to an album. If you've got an album that's got a shit song on it, especially if it's in the middle of a side, you're not going to play it as much because you know you're going to have to get up and skip that track. That's what I've tried to do with these, it's records that I don't mind putting on then you can relax or talk to people or whatever, but you know you're not going to get some kind of fucking horrible shitty stinker of a song on it. Abbey Road - I was young at the time, 10, 11, 12, whatever, and the track that ends side one, 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)' that was mind-blowing to me, the way it went on and on and on at the end, with this big synthy wooshy noise. I've since found out its Ringo playing this machine that sounds like wind that you get in classical orchestras. It was a psychedelic experience in a living room in a normal part of Sheffield in the early 70s, where, you know, psychedelic experiences weren't that common. I'll always remember it, that song in particularly took me somewhere. And that's the end of that side - if you had Abbey Road on CD it wouldn't be right, it only really works as a statement if you listen to it for ages and then it suddenly stops and then you're left in silence for a while until you can be bothered to get up and start again. I started with this because it plays with what an album can be. It's great.
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