An image from the cassette era. I still have the promo postcards some guy I met at the cinema during a trip to London in 1995 later sent me.
Reading this Film Comment interview with Alan Rudolph while listening to cassettes on a wee boombox I dug up in this house. The radio is mono, sports an antenna, does not have autoreverse, and belonged to my late father-in-law. It's making me uncommonly happy.
AR: Music to me is like the hub of the wheel. It’s visible, it works in your senses and emotions, and that seems to be where I reside. To me, music and emotional responses are twins, and if you want to establish emotional tone in a film then music is the number one way to do it.
FC: I read one of your early interviews where you said that you were more influenced by John Coltrane than by John Ford.
AR: Some glib asshole said that, I guess it was me. It’s true. I mean, look, I’m not going to deny John Ford, but for me personally that’s all I’ve ever been able to talk about when it comes to American filmmaking. I taught myself how to write screenplays just because the box I was in was too confining as an assistant director in the old Hollywood system. If you wanted to make a little film then you went to Roger Corman, I guess. I didn’t know where he was and I didn’t care. I just didn’t make those kinds of movies. So I started writing. I’d write a screenplay in three or four days just to learn how to do it. At the time you’d go to the Xerox machine with three dollars and you had a movie. But I always listened to music. This was before mobile technology, so when the first Walkman came out—I think it was the size of a Kleenex box—it changed my life forever. I started to tape pieces of music that I liked and I’d make little cassettes without putting labels on them. I used to prowl record stores after work every Friday night and I’d buy albums to tape them. I must have had a hundred tapes without knowing what was coming up next. It was a primitive version of shuffle. I’d walk around Manhattan and watch a movie unfold on the sidewalks listening to how it was scored in my head. But it’s funny, the number-one album was always Kind of Blue. Without that album, I’m not sure I would have been able to make films. Kind of Blue was my film school.
