Mulholland Drive

During the war, I saw all these films that made me love cinema so much. I’d skip school regularly to see movies in the afternoon and even in the morning, in the small theaters that opened that early. At first I wasn’t sure if I’d be a critic or a filmmaker, but I knew it’d be something like that. I had thought of writing, and that later on I’d be a novelist. Then I decided I’d be a film critic. Then I gradually started thinking I should make movies. I think seeing all these movies was a sort of apprenticeship. The New Wave is often criticized for its lack of experience. It’s made up of people with all kinds of backgrounds. There are assistants, screenwriters, but also people like me who had done nothing more than write in Cahiers and see thousands of movies. I saw some films fourteen or fifteen times, like The Rules of the Game or The Golden Coach. But there is a way to see movies without it being tedious or academic that can teach you more than working as an assistant director. Basically, the assistant is a boy who wants to see how movies are made, but who’s constantly prevented from doing just that because he gets sent on errands while the important things take place. He’s always required to do things that take him away from the set.