The movie evolved to be about journalists and about people reporting back about the world. The New Yorker, for whatever reason, has always occupied some special place for me in my reading, and I will always love that magazine; it’s had so many different writers and artists over all those years. New York, also, always represented something waiting. It was always something happening right now, but—for me—it was also the future for many years. Then I was there, and that was a big thing for me.
About details, what I can say is that, when you tell a story, you try to bring it to life. You want to tell the story as richly as you can and bring your characters to life as fully as you can. The French Dispatch, that one revealed itself as we went along.
Finally, what’s your personal relationship with collecting physical media?
I have a trillion old LaserDiscs and VHS tapes, and then came the DVDs, if we’re talking about movies in particular. Blu-Rays, to me, have been the greatest. They’re just so sharp. I mean, with the Criterion Collection, sometimes the DVDs are such good transfers and so carefully done that they look like Blu-Rays. But a Blu-Ray, to me, is perfect, and a 4K Blu-Ray, I guess, goes beyond that. I like to have them. I like to say, “Let me just grab it.” They could all go on a big hard-drive, and there are great, big hard-drives that can load in thousands of Blu-Rays. But I love having them at hand and having the actual physical copy; then, you’ve got it forever.
Criterion, we can say without hesitation, is the best. They are the ones who look after the legacies of so many different great artists—possibly more than in any medium. I don’t know another medium where there’s one group who you can say look after the most important work. Warner Archive, for instance, has something special; Turner Classic Movies does something that is magnificent, in this ongoing rotation of films, so many of which the majority of which we look through and have never heard of, in terms of the work or product of Hollywood cinema.
In terms of what you call physical media, the Blu-Rays and DVDs of the Warner Archive are very good quality; there’s a huge body of work, and there are lots of interesting ones, and you discover American movies that you’ve never seen there. But Criterion is massive, and it’s unique. I’ve said before, they are like the Louvre of cinema. I love that they’ve produced this quote-unquote archive, and I am slightly shocked to see how many years of work has gone into it, and into the movies themselves.
