I don't even know that I want to go on, at all. When I saw Kubrick, I said: I don't know why the hell I do this. Tell me why you do it, because I'm not so sure I love doing it." And he said, "It's better to do it than not to do it." I suppose that's true. It explains why I keep making films though there are so many things involved that panic or distress me.
Original post: Tell it, brother. Roger Ebert's review of Ask The Dust doesn't make me any more eager to see the movie, but it does tell me he knows something about writers (or at least this writer) and the difficulty of depicting the art on film.
Who is harder to portray in a movie than a writer? The standard portrait is familiar: The shabby room, the typewriter, the bottle, the cigarettes, the crazy neighbors, the nickel cup of coffee...
For the record, I think I may have told one or two of you this privately, but: My favorite depiction of a writer in any film, at least in terms of Getting It Right about what it's like for me, remains Hank Azaria in Cradle Will Rock.
Still, in its wider focus, "Ask the Dust" finds a kind of poetry, because although we may not find it noble and romantic to sit alone in a room, broke and hung over and dreaming of glory, a writer can, and must. The film stars Colin Farrell as Arturo Bandini, who lives in a Los Angeles rooming house during the Depression. He has sold one story to the American Mercury, edited by H. L. Mencken, the god of American letters, and now he tries to write more: "The greatest man in America -- do you want to let him down?"
What the movie is about, above all, is the bittersweet solitude of the would-be great writer. Whether Arturo will become the next Hemingway (or Fante, or Bukowski) is uncertain, but Farrell shows him as a young man capable of playing the role should he win it...
Because all us next Hemingways look like Colin Farrell.
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