David Thomson – the author of a number of indispensable books, including The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (a simply essential volume for any movie lover), Have You Seen…?”: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (highly recommended), and The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies (an extraordinary accomplishment) – has a new book out (as he usually does): A Light in the Dark: A History of Movie Directors.
Thomson is one of Mid Century Cinema’s favorite writers on film; late last year we had the opportunity to (virtually) sit with him for this long conversation. The occasion of his new book inspired another conversation, which appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-very-acute-watcher-a-conversation-with-david-thomson/
You might think, having talked Hitchcock (“By god, this was a true obsessive, this was a man who had a vision based in anxiety or fear, whatever you want to call it, and he had a very complex attitude to his actors and his characters and to the audience”) and Welles (“Have you ever heard the recordings where he’s doing commercials for garden peas and so on? He goes from the sort of full-bodied, you’ve got to have these peas kind of thing to his cynical, sardonic voice about the crap he’s having to do”) and so many other favorites, that we’d have not much left to say. But you’d be wrong! In a few weeks we’ll be posting some bootleg footage from our discussion, featuring highlights left on the cutting room floor. So watch this space to hear still more from Thomson—about Breaking Bad, Mikey and Nicky, One False Move, and more!
