Mark J. Harris gets to rub elbows with tomorrow’s filmmakers today.
Harris, a three-time Oscar winner and Distinguished Professor of Film and TV Production in the School of Cinematic Arts at USC, works with some of the most promising young movie makers around. He checked in with WWTW to share his thoughts about the next generation of filmmakers and the directors who matter most to them.
WWTW:Tell me about the fledgling film students who apply to the USC School of Cinematic Arts — are their tastes and talents different from past generations? Are they more or less prepared on day one of classes than their predecessors?
MH: Each generation of students is different from the last. They grow up in a different world and under different influences. I fell in love with movies in the ’60s and was greatly affected by European cinema: Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, Louis Malle, Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Bergman. Also Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray.
Despite the easy accessibility of these films on DVD, most of the students who come to USC, especially undergraduates, are not familiar with these masters.
Who are the filmmakers who influence them? Americans mostly: Spielberg, Lucas, Coppola, (Spike) Lee, the Coen brothers, Tarantino, Scorsese and Apatow (Ang Lee possibly being an Americanized exception.) Some do see martial arts films from Hong Kong, but in general they have not seen many foreign films because only a few revival houses remain and films with subtitles don?t usually play at the local multiplex.
I wish there were women directors I could say were models for female filmmakers, but actually it’s the absence of prominent female directors that often motivates women to come to film school. They feel the time has finally come to bring their vision of the world to the screen.
WWTW: Do your students gravitate more toward short films … documentaries … features … and has this changed in recent years?
MH: Although almost all the films students make at film school are short– 5 to 20 minutes — they all aspire to make features, whether fiction or non-fiction. There is no real venue for shorts in movie theaters. And everyone wants to see his or her films on the big screen.
In recent years, we have witnessed a lot more students who are interested in documentary filmmaking. Although USC has a reputation as a ?Hollywood? school, we actually have one of the strongest documentary programs of any American film school. The impact of films like “?An Inconvenient Truth”? and “?Supersize Me”? has had an effect on socially-conscious young people who see the documentary form as a way of influencing public opinion and bringing about badly needed social change in this country.
The popularity of Michael Moore and Sacha Baron Cohen has also shown that documentaries can be entertaining as well as informative, and that they can be quirky and idiosyncratic as well as deeply personal. Many of my USC students have made wonderful autobiographical documentaries exploring issues of race, gender, religion, identity and family.
Tomorrow: Harris discusses how tech-savvy many young filmmakers are today, and how their unbridled passion has helped shape his own work.
Related posts:
on 
on 
{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Hitchcock = American?
I didn’t catch that myself … duly noted!
This is a pretty interesting article. He makes a lot of good points about the different kinds of film making that have come to light in recent years. This made me think of all the alternative options for learning how to make films. The owrld has opened up doe to the internet and it’s pretty easy to find a program that is exactly what you need. I was recently looking into The Film Connection (http://www.film-connection.com/directing_sub.html)and was impressed by the fact that they work around your schedule and you can take their courses from anywhere in America.
He became a US citizen.
He became a US citizen.
Signing some documents doesn’t change your stylistic roots. It can reduce your income tax, however.
I never said it did. I was just pointing out that it wasn’t incorrect to call him an American director, at least for his later work.
The British don’t tax overseas citizens, and I believe that they never did.
An Inconvenient Truth and Supersize Me influenced public opinion? Interesting. I would argue that they instead catered to popular public opinion. Nothing Hollywood about man made global warming or P.C. obesity causes. So edgy.