When I was younger, people were inventing a new way of writing - James Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner. And I thought we had to find a structure for cinema. I fought for a radical cinema, and I continued all my life.
The South is full of memories and ghosts of the past. For me, it is the most inspiring place to write, from William Faulkner's haunted antebellum home to the banks of the Mississippi to the wind that whispers through the cotton fields.
It worries me that undergrads and high school students are forced into books they aren't ready for, like Faulkner's, and then they are afraid of putting their toes in the water again.
My father was among the first of his generation to look into writers who've become part of the American lit. canon. When he wrote his master's thesis on William Faulkner in the Forties, he couldn't find anybody on the faculty at Columbia University to oversee it because they didn't read Faulkner.
Oh, he's magic. Faulkner has opened passages in my brain. You do things you'd never expect.
I'd love to have William Faulkner, Beethoven and Bach over. I want to find out what makes those guys tick!
I don't want to turn 50 and say, 'Gosh, I wish I'd lived in that part of the world for a time. I wish I'd read that book by Faulkner.' I want time to delve back into Thoreau and Kafka.
I actually did work and produced two short dissertations, one on Faulkner and one on the film criticism of the stream-of-consciousness novelist Dorothy Richardson.
Mr. Faulkner, of course, is interested in making your mind rather than your flesh creep.
Faulkner wrote for film, and his ear is just impeccable.
