The New Yorker’s Richard Brody on the State of Movies Today

Brian, it's a pleasure to be here.

Thank you for having me.

When did you first think about becoming a movie critic?

Um, much earlier and much later than one should.

Um, I was not a movies person in high school.

I didn't, uh, fall in love with the art of movies until I was a freshman in college in 1975, and what made me a movie person was a viewing of Jean-Luc Godard's film Breathless.

Um, it was a molecular transformation.

Uh, I came out of that film, uh, converted to the cinema, and I knew that everything I did in life would have to do with movies.

The first thing I also knew was that I wanted to know more about this person, Jean-Luc Godard, whoever that was.

Uh, I didn't even know what a director was, really.

Um, for me, movies were Saturday night entertainment, nothing more, uh, until that point.

So when I was on my way home to my parents' house on Long Island for Thanksgiving, I stopped at a bookstore on 57th Street, The Coliseum, which no longer exists unfortunately, and found a book called Godard on Godard, figuring he'd be talking about himself.

Turns out to be a book of his film criticism.

Very strange.

I knew that there was such a thing as a film critic.

I read reviews every now and then, but it was a big surprise to me to discover that the person who I considered, you know, the greatest, or we could say the only filmmaker I knew anything about, had been or even was a film critic.

Um, needless to say, um, I learned a great deal about film from what he wrote, but I also learned conceptually that one of the things that made his films so interesting is precisely the fact that as a critic, he thought like a filmmaker, and as a filmmaker, he thought like a critic.

So I pretty quickly realized that I was gonna be able to write film criticism long before I was gonna be able to write movies, and that's what I started to do in college.

After your conversion, I imagine you wanted to see a lot of old movies.

Yes.

Uh-

Old and new.

How'd you go about doing that in the '70s?

Um, well, first of all, in college there was a film society.

Um, we, students projected, selected and projected films on 16 millimeter for other students.