Three Great Things is Talkhouse’s series in which artists tell us about three things they absolutely love. To mark the September 2 release on Prime Video of director Kevin Macdonald’s new thriller The Runner, starring Gal Gadot and Damian Lewis, the Oscar-winning Scottish filmmaker shared some of the things that bring him joy in life. — N.D.
Lonesome Dove
The first thing that comes to mind, because I was having a conversation about it yesterday with my son, is the book Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. I read it for the first time about three years ago and my son, who’s 18, is reading it now. What he and I were discussing is how it’s the most immersive reading experience with the best characters, and you never want to leave the world of the book. As you get to the end of it and the number of pages you have left to read keeps dwindling, you're already almost in mourning for the book ending. The weird thing is, I was reading The New Yorker this morning and saw that there was an article about what you should read next if you're in mourning for having just finished Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry! One of the suggestions was, don't read the prequel or the sequel, as you'll just be disappointed. (The article actually recommended reading Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, if you can get past the racism.)
My son and I talked about what it is that makes a great book and how few books there are like Lonesome Dove which have this effect on you. When you’re reading it, you immerse yourself in an almost thousand-page book and allow yourself to be completely taken into another world, getting to know and love characters who are slowly revealed to you. Our modern world is so frenetic – what we typically consume is a tweet or an 80-minute thriller – so there's something special about spending that time and feeling the landscape and the sense of period. Lonesome Dove is a book that has a profound effect on you.
I haven't seen the miniseries adaptation of Lonesome Dove, and I don't really want to because the book created a spell I don’t want to break. There's something magnificent about the fact that a 50-something-year-old man like me can read and be swept up in a book like that, and that it feels modern in some ways and yet also timeless. But also that an 18-year-old boy can feel equally about the same book. It requires quite a talent to be able to do that, and as my son and I were saying, there aren't many other books that could do the same thing.
“Alexandra Leaving”
My favorite song of all time Leonard Cohen’s “Alexandra Leaving,” which is on 10 New Songs, one of his later albums. I became obsessed with this song and, like quite a few Leonard Cohen songs, it's got the most incredible history. He wrote it over a long period of time, and it's actually a reworking of “The God Abandons Antony,” a famous poem by the poet CP Cavafy. Cavafy lived in Alexandria, Egypt, at the turn of the previous century, but was of Greek origin. “The God Abandons Antony” is about a moment in the life of Antony, of Antony and Cleopatra fame. According to the historian Plutarch, Antony’s army was departing, refusing to fight for him anymore, and he was left on his own in Alexandria, defenseless. Caesar Augustus was closing in and Antony was going to be wiped out. As Antony's sitting there on his own, he hears a band of musicians disappearing down the street and realizes that this is the god Bacchus, his protector, leaving him.
Cavafy’s poem is about a god departing, but Leonard Cohen turns it into a song about a lover leaving for the last time, and it's the most beautiful twist. The other thing that obsessed me about this poem and the song is that Cavafy only became known as a literary figure because of the novelist E.M. Forster, who wrote A Room with a View and Howard’s End, amongst other things. Forster publicized Cavafy’s work because he met him when he was in Alexandria just after the First World War. At the time, Forster had writer’s block and couldn't complete his last book, Passage to India, but when he met Cavafy and heard his poems, that gave him the inspiration to finish it.
A lot of the writers and periods I'm really fascinated by are encapsulated in this song of loss and melancholy; that sort of delicate emotion of the melancholy farewell is one of my favorite emotions. When I was younger, Bob Dylan was the be-all and end-all for me, but as time has gone on, Leonard Cohen has grown in my estimation. There's something about the concentrated poetic force of Cohen, his lyrics combined with the melodic but ironic simplicity of his singing (or chanting?). His work feels timeless, and there's an ambiguity to his songs that leaves room for you to develop your own interpretation.
Los Angeles
I live in London, but I'm in Los Angeles at the moment. I first came here in the early ’90s, when I was writing a book about my grandfather, Emeric Pressburger, a Jewish filmmaker who ended up in Britain and in the 1940s made classic movies with Michael Powell like The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, A Matter of Life and Death and The Red Shoes. I was writing a book about him, and I went up to the Hollywood Hills and met Billy Wilder, the composer Miklos Rozsa, and all these amazing people who had worked with my grandfather over the years. My vision of Los Angeles is still the vision I had on that first trip, when some of these people from the golden era of Hollywood in the ’40s and ’50s were still alive and in reasonably good health. Billy Wilder was still trying to get a movie off the ground, at aged 80-something!
I've always retained that sense of the romance of Los Angeles, even as the city has, in reality, probably lost a lot of that. When I drive by Chaplin Studios, I'm reminded of the time I went there to make a documentary connected to Charlie Chaplin and I met some of the last people still alive who had worked with Chaplin. Everywhere in the city, which is so brash, vulgar and modern, there are these little bits of history. If you're a film buff, you make sure to drive by the apartment building where they shot In a Lonely Place, or the Sunset Tower, which is memorably featured in Altman’s The Player. As a film lover, Los Angeles still gives you a little frisson. I don't know for how much longer there will be people like me who have some connection to that period, but I still feel it when I drive into the city from the airport and pass by nodding donkeys. It's a dusty, grimy city, but there's also this romance.
One of the inspirations behind me doing The Runner, which is a straightforward thriller in terms of its presentation, is that I wanted to make a film in contemporary London, in my city, a film that people would be able to watch in 30 years and say, Here's a picture of this city at this precise moment in time. As a documentary filmmaker, primarily, one of the things I love about films is seeing what's going on in the background: Oh, that's where that building was … Look at the color of that woman's dress. Those little accidental things in the background are part of the beauty of cinema.
