under the influence:

i've literally seen thousands of films. i was raised on movies. my step-father collected movies and at his collection's height, he had close to 10,000 movies on tape. i recorded a large percentage of these movies off the TV for him. my job was to keep the commercials out and if i didn't... there was punishment to be given or received in my case. so.. i paid close attention. most of the films were from the 40's and 50's. i don't remember them all but i'm sure there is an imprint or residue left in my mind somewhere... odd really to think about. anyway, last night chet and i were discussing what type of feel we wanted 'the film' to have and the word 'dark' kept popping up from both of us. and when i think of darker films i think of films like 'memento' and 'fight club'. but i also think of 'ghost world' and 'fargo' too. there is a simplistic beauty to these films with 'dark' undertones. it doesn't have to be violent to be dark. yes, 'fargo' had it's violent moments but the stark simplicity of the film created a different 'darker' world. it's hard for me to explain what i mean here.

anyway... my influences are far and wide from 'singing in the rain' to 'house of a 1,000 corpses' to 'spirited away' to 'brazil'. my favorites over the past few years have been 'the ring', '28 days', 'a mighty wind', 'o brother where art thou', 'lock stock and two smoking barrels', 'memento', 'sexy beast', 'big fish', 'snatch', 'minority report', 'adaptation', 'matchstick men', 'being john malkovich', 'lost in translation' and 'vanilla sky'. ok...so you can see a darker influence there but these were all really cool films. a bit out of the ordinary. you get the point. that's the type of film i want to do.

i think the music i listen to fits these films as well. maybe i'm just dark. if you want a dark music list... let me know.

just my two cents here...