An email interview between Lus Mendona and Joo Lameira from the website pala de Walsh (http://apaladewalsh.

.com) and the famous film critic and historian David Thomson. You write about cinema as if writing about an unrequited love or at least a lost love. Is there resentment with cinema? A lost or unrequited love? Yes, I think this is correct and intuitive, in that to spend ones life with cinema (or to spend ones life at the cinema) is to feel the enormous weight of desire while facing the remorseless habit of desire being satisfied as in marriage or partnership. Does this breed resentment? Well, sometimes, along with a murderous instinct, But frustration is a source of comedy, too. I think I recognize myself in the Fernando Rey character in That Obscure Object of Desire, humiliated at every turn but driven onward and still excited by the dance. And if life becomes a kind of torture with Bouquet and Molina, well, perhaps the only other solution would be to add Deneuve, Kidman and Barbara Stanwyck to the harem. There is also a way in which, being 72, I see the mis-spent rhythm of my life, though I think Im more amused by that than bitter. We all have to make our awful mistakes. It comes in finding a sublime medium or the perfect woman Grace Kelly has a way of turning into Thelma Ritter. But can Ritter become Kelly? You have a love-hate relationship with some directors. Even if you are an admirer of "Citizen Kane" and some of his other work, Rosebud, your Orson Welles biography, is almost a personal attack. Love-hate? Agreed. Early on, I guessed the stupidity in the auteur theory of thinking some people could do no wrong. I believe that the most magical genius can fall in a custard pie. Real, confused people make films and often succumb to the muddle. I am a little startled at the idea that Rosebud seems like a personal attack on Orson, though I see what you mean if you need to believe that he could do no wrong. I suspect he had a fleeting chance of doing right in putting on a show. I think Welles is the most intriguing and impressive person we have had in film though he spills over in other directions, far more than other directors. I accept his warning, that he was a scorpion: ruthless, cruel, capricious, indifferent to others, incapable of having many lasting relationships, bad husband, worse father, often a cheat, liar and a fraud. Cant you see his grin and hear, Of course! Arent our most valuable relationships in life those of love-hate? Parents, lovers, gods, politicians, our children. Only the dogs exhibit flawless nobility. Even with your favorite directors we can trace a resentment. In your latest book The Big Screen you turn on Howard Hawks for making you believe that a relationship between a man and a woman could be a back and forth of witty comebacks. Well, I fell in love with Hawks through a complete season of his films at the National Film Theatre in London in 1961. I admired so much: his range, the wit that colored all material, the regard for women, courage, duty and the fear of failure. I especially adored the classic simplicity of his style. Im sure that this made me behave personally in a Hawksian way that was vulgar, ridiculous and difficult for real companions. As time has gone by (and this culminates in The Big Screen and in a course on Hawks I taught at Stanford in 2012), I came to see Hawks in a different light (this was increased by having known Slim Hawks). So I see him more and more as a poseur and a fantasist and I look on him more skeptically as if he might have taught me to smoke, gamble and be promiscuous (I hasten to add, in my head, not in life). He is still my companion, though I see now that the comedies are the best of Hawks. So he is a rather unreliable father I have to take care of.

Doesn't the ability to elicit such strong sentiments from you contradict the idea that cinema has lost its power over the viewer? Or is it only in the younger viewer that you notice this indifference? Yes. I am still a victim of the drug. I still watch Chelsea (on TV), though I have no hope of running to the ball. I do regret the loss of movie as a mass form (if only for my children), but that has happened, and I am not only resigned to it but happy to see new ways and wonder for instance a short, Three, Two (by Sarah-Violet Bliss), just seen at the Telluride festival, that is a single shot, a minute, and worthy of Lubitsch. Do you believe the reduction of the size of the image - from the big screen to the tablet -, the change of cinema from a collective experience to an individual one - and a decrease in the attention-span are to blame in that growing indifference? Size? Yes, I think one has to believe in that change, but it began in the 50s, with television, or in realizing that the experience has always been affected by the technology. Much is lost, but something is gained. So the nostalgist must keep his eyes on the future. And still as you write about the end of movies you still live in California where you moved more than thirty years ago to stay close to cinema, as if you couldn't let go. Well, there are other reasons for living in California the communion with nature (the sea, the mountains, the desert) and the light and the air that go with it. Every day I walk my dog on the seashore and that means as much to me as being near Hollywood. But, note, I live in San Francisco, not Los Angeles. Still, it has been very good that it got me to be close enough to the old place to be able to explore its history and meet its veterans. Also, it has been important to be close enough to the business to feel how far that shapes our films. From where does that fascination with the sordid, "the secret history of cinema", with what's left out of the screen - personal lives, the stories of the studios, etc. come from? The sordid, secret history? Well, I think so many movies and stories, say, look, there is a secret, come and find me out and I respond to that. I am a Lubitsch pleased to find that the duchess has bad breath without being righteous or disapproving. Id rather feed her Esterhazy honey balls until she is sweet enough to kiss. I do love to know the real way a Hawks lived. I am touched and frightened by the idea of Welles sitting in a small garden by a pile of cigar ends. In a similar way, I love to wonder what happens to the characters after a film ends, or what might have happened if different directions had been followed in a script. When you write about actors and directors - dead or alive - you give as much credit to fact and gossip, to opinions about the work and speculation and intuition about personal lives. Isn't it unfair to them? Unfair to actors? Fascinating point, very fair question. But I see actors as prototypes of celebrities, people whose true nature is lost in the multitude of roles they take. And I feel the unfairness with which they gaze into my darkness and say, Arent I lovely? Wouldnt you like me? But then add Dont touch! I think these people are imagined beings open to a different kind of inspection, and thus they have taught us to realize that we are all acting all the time. If one of them cries out, Oh, Im hurt! because of what Ive written, Im quite ready to be sorry. But it doesnt often happen. For example, the host of the US radio show

Fresh Air once asked Catherine Deneuve if she wasnt offended by the way I had talked in the Dictionary about the overlapping goodness in her young image and the interest in a kind of depravity in her roles. The interviewer clearly expected to get Deneuves agreement and some What a horrible thing to say line. But she agreed with the passage and was clearly intrigued by it. There is a Bunuel in everyone. Have you ever seen yourself as just a critic? Does criticism interest you at all? Am I a critic? Well, I suppose so, sometimes. I have been employed as what you might call a film reviewer or critic. But I find that approach constraining. I like to look for more imaginative ways of writing about the experience. I like to provoke disagreement whereas many critics need to think they are right. Do you write about cinema to exorcize ghosts created by it? Ghosts? Yes. But I would say I do it far more to bring them near than to exorcise them. I think my preferred party is a seance. There are some important movie dictionaries, like the Dictionary of Directors by Sadoul, the Dictionary of Cinema by Jacques Lourcelles and, of course, your own Biographical Dictionary of Cinema. At the same time there is still some reluctance in acknowledging these works as important theoretical or critical works for their own sake. It is as the dictionary is only an intermediate tool and not the main one. Did you face this kind of general prejudice when you release and still now when you are continually re-releasing your Biographical Dictionary? Yes, the Dictionary upset some people just because of its format and I am happy to say that the book is still outrageous, impossible and as much fiction or memoir as a book of reference. At the same time, I cannot tell you how many people over the years have told me the Dictionary changed their lives and helped them grasp the nature of cinema. The thing I most like about the book is that while introducing people to film, it stands up for literature. That is the bipolar condition of my own life. Why did you end up doing something as megalomaniacal as writing a (auto)biographical dictionary on cinema? Even more so when you know it will always be an unfinished work? I suppose because megalomania waited to be released being bipolar is a part of me. I suppose, too, I have a Borgesian love of the unfinished. As long as I can I will do the Dictionary (I am working on a 6th edition) but I insist on doing other things. For example, I am now working on books on Hair and Murder.