The Wizard Of Oz

When I was growing up you couldn't just watch a movie a hundred times. It just came on TV. So the movies that you'd see over and over were the movies that would play annually. I don't know why, but where I lived they would play The Wizard Of Oz at Easter time. For whatever reason, I'd always be at someone's house playing out in the yard, and someone would say, "Let's go in and watch The Wizard Of Oz!" And it would be a reasonably nice, almost summer night, and here we are watching this fantastical f***ing movie. Now, it wouldn't be that fantastical to someone just seeing it now, but I've seen this thing almost every year of my entire life until I was 12 years old. And it just became one of those things, you know, after you've seen it five times that there are different little mythologies -- like, what is it, with the guy killing himself. It just built up more dimensions.

But the same would be true of these movies that you'd see around Christmastime. But The Wizard Of Oz, I've been damaged by it. I've seen it so many times that I think it informed my life. Part of it's in black and white and part of it's in color. When you're watching it and you're a little kid, it's not even a movie; it's just a thing that's happening in front of you. Later you realize that's a crazy thing that they did there. And when you think about how great the tornado scene looks -- it'd be hard to make it that great using today's technology. I mean, it really is stunning. And [Judy Garland]? It's just uncanny how good she is. She cried in that movie and it makes you cry. To this day I can hear a recording of her crying in that movie. I don't know if that's a subconscious power because I absorbed that movie, or if it really had that power. I don't think I'll ever be able to tell. And it's very psychedelic. When The Wizard Of Oz got connected to Dark Side Of The Moon, I was like, "Well, of course." We all jumped for joy because we had one more joy to listen to Pink Floyd and watch The Wizard Of Oz. It just kept giving and giving and giving.

“When you're watching it and you're a little kid, it's not even a movie; it's just a thing that's happening in front of you.”

You talk about this movie's power and its ability to make you cry without using CGI or computer effects. As movies rely on those sorts of techniques more and more, do you find yourself having this reaction less and less? Like, did you cry at Avatar?

No, I wouldn't say so. But I know grown-ups, adults with me even now, who saw the latest Toy Story and literally cried while watching it on the plane. We're still early in filming in this computer-world. But no, I think the power of the story changes everything. I think we can all walk into a movie and know it's all fake. It's all a contrived thing. No one's actually dying. None of this is actually happening. But we all want to just be thrown in. I know it's fake, but I want to eat popcorn and be immersed. I think everything counts, but most of it is the story. Even when I was young, The Beatles' Yellow Submarine? As much as I was surrounded by people doing drugs, people who loved The Beatles, all that great post-Peter Max psychedelic stuff. To me, I just get lost after a while. It's too long; I don't care about the story. I like that they're singing songs but I would get bored with it after a while.

“I think the power of the story changes everything.”

The Trial

It's based on a [Franz] Kafka book. I don't think it's a great movie, but it's great for me. It's full of these strange nightmarish -- [Orson] Welles' movies always look so stunning even though I wouldn't like the music or the stiff acting. This has some of that, but it has moments that for my psyche, it reminds me of these strange being-scared-of-the-world moments I had growing up watching The Twilight Zone. "Why are people insane?" For whatever reason when I was little there was a lot of talk about people losing their minds. My brothers took a lot of drugs and we knew crazy people. So it was prominent in my mind. But you see movies when you're young and you don't realize that it's a compacted bunch of drama. It's meant to stir you, but you just start to believe what's in front of you.

“For whatever reason when I was little there was a lot of talk about people losing their minds.”

Orson Welles has a lot of movies that are not stellar. This one is not stellar, but it really moved me. There's this scene where he takes a towel off his head -- I don't know why he's got this steamy towel on his head -- but he's such a master of these kind of moments. He stands up, the camera pans up, and there's some cool music and sound effects, and when he takes this towel off his head the steam is staying there for a couple of moments. And as he says his first lines, there's this steam illuminating the backlights. And you think, "F***." You wouldn't even think of that with CGI. It's such an absurd, cool moment. Welles can do those things.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Again, seeing that with my brothers, we'd think UFOs were going to land and not realizing how well it was done. When you're young you just watch movies and one would just seem like the next. But when I got older I'd review it, re-evaluate it, rethink it, re-examine all the elements of the drama. Without it being made, the world wouldn't be what it is. There are so many people who go to that movie and say, "This is what I want to be."

It just felt as though if there was this dream-world utopia, I think I saw it.

Yeah. I remember seeing it again. It rooted the idea that by the year 2001 I'd be living in space. I think that's the idea [Stanley] Kubrick was evoking in it. Maybe he himself thought it. And then as it got closer I remember thinking, "I don't think that's going to happen." [Laughs.] I remember, there was a moment when my older brothers -- I love my brothers so much -- it had to be 1969 or 1970 and we looked into the future and thought that by the year 2000 we would be living in outer space listening to groups like The Beatles. That's all we're going to need to do. We had no inkling of, "Do you think we'll need jobs? Do you think we'll give a s*** about anything else?" It just felt as though if there was this dream-world utopia, I think I saw it. Of course, it would never work. But this idea that aliens were going to land, and we're going to be let in on this other dimension, and that was going to actually happen while I was alive. So you could imagine by the mid-'70s when all that seemed to be an utter hallucination. We didn't have any skills. And it's like, oh no, there's this world where you have to get a job and pay taxes. None of that s*** is going away. But there was a moment where a lot of things changed and we had to find a new utopia. I don't know that we ever did. Or maybe we shouldn't.