Beck on his formative film education and the road to Ride Lonesome • Journal • A Magazine • , Life in canada

Although, some of my favorite films, like The Night of the Hunter, by Charles Laughton, it’s the only film he ever made. He made one film. Maybe that’s all you need to do. So I think maybe at some point I would be interested in digging into it. I always felt I would make films that would be wildly unpopular.

Why?

There’s a lot of things about film that I like that would be sort of frowned upon now.

That’s what people have said about your music, though, and that’s obviously not true.

I would say 70 percent of the films that I watch are pre-1960. I mostly watch older films. And one of the things I love them is that most of them are filmed on these fake sets. They’re at a wharf. They’re on a beach. It’s completely fake. You can see that it’s fake, and there’s a theater to it. There’s a constructed world that I find so charming. It’s not reality.

And then we get into the late ’60s and ’70s, where cinema becomes very realist and about how gritty and real you can make it. I really love something that’s so obviously cardboard. It’s a fake ocean. I think, in a weird way, I find that more emotionally evocative than filming a real ocean. It kind of takes it to the theater, and it’s something I love about old films. But that immediately would be something that, I think, would be distasteful to modern audiences.

I also like films that have a lot of space. I’ve been asked to do movie scores. Some of my favorite films have no music. I love movies that don’t have wall-to-wall music. I like movies that have a lot of dialogue or quiet in it, where the audience would be understimulated.

Are there filmmakers that you haven’t collaborated with yet that you would like to?

I’ve known Wim Wenders for a long time, and he’s worked with friends of mine, and he’s one of my top three filmmakers. I’ve always been sad to not work with him.