FORSGREN: The 3 movies that made me want to go to film school
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Film school isn’t for everyone. Most people like the movies, but there are few who actually ever desire to make movies themselves, and fewer still ever decide they want to dedicate their college studies to it. And yet, that’s exactly what happened to me.
Thinking back, I can identify three movies that steered me toward attending film school. In each case, the directors behind these movies had a massive impact on my life, even though we’ve never met face-to-face.
“STAR WARS”
Some kids have a beloved pet that dominates their happy childhood memories. I had “Star Wars”. George Lucas’s space saga fills most of my best childhood memories. I remember running about my backyard, pretending to blast Imperial Stormtroopers and evading Darth Vader. These were the first stories I ever made up myself.
Like so many children of the time, my imagination was sparked by “Star Wars”. I started plotting my own stories set in Lucas’s universe. That led to the desire to create my own worlds and tell my own stories. When I was old enough to understand that the filmmaking process was basically one form of storytelling, I began to want to make my own movies.
So, “Star Wars” planted the story-telling seed in my consciousness. The desire to tell my own stories eventually led me to study movies.
“ARMY OF DARKNESS”
One afternoon late in my high school career, one of my buddies sat me down and showed me a movie called “Army of Darkness”. In the film, a dunderheaded department store clerk named Ash is cast back in time to the dark ages. He finds himself thrust into the role of savior of a medieval village and locks horns with an army of evil Deadites.
If “Star Wars” inspired me to tell visual stories, “Army of Darkness” became exemplary of the kind of movies I wanted to make. I loved the mix of slapstick humor, zippy one-liners and zombie-killing action. I loved the Ash character, a completely worthless bum who became a butt-kicking machine whenever he needed to fight Deadites.
More than that, “Army of Darkness” was the first movie where I really took notice of how the film was shot. I wanted to move the camera around the way director Sam Raimi did. He framed his shots in a way the recalled panels from comic books.
Raimi’s action scenes frothed with energy and exuberance. I wanted to borrow those elements for my own films, but recreating “Army of Darkness” or “Star Wars” seemed impossible. How could I possibly make something that looked like those films I loved so much?
“CLERKS”
“Clerks” is the movie that convinced me I could actually make a movie myself. After all, “Clerks” was basically ninety minutes of two guys talking. There were no elaborate visual effects. The camera didn’t move very much. “Clerks” was the first movie I saw that left me saying “Yeah, I can do that.”
Trouble is, it wasn’t that easy. To pull off something like “Clerks”, one must write really interesting, funny dialogue. That is not that easy to do. At film school, I struggled mightily to write dialogue that wasn’t stilted or bland.
Before too long, I was borrowing liberally from “Clerks” writer/director Kevin Smith, aping the way he writes dialogue. So, not only did “Clerk” convince me I could make a film, but it heavily influenced how I write … In almost everything I write.
Upon seeing those three films, I knew I had to at least try to learn how to make my own movies, and while that hasn’t exactly panned out, it did get me to film school, which is where I grew to love writing. If not for these three movies, I probably wouldn’t be writing this column. Feel free to send your hate mail (or thank you notes) to George Lucas, Sam Raimi, and Kevin Smith.