OTHER TECH

But it seems like things like cellphones and iPods have changed what it means to congregate. Today, you can be in public but you're so isolated by these devices that you're really in private. It's true, exactly. That's why I'm hoping the balance of nature reasserts itself, because if you go into extreme isolation you feel it, you know it, and then you want to come back into the public arena. So a kid might want to play on his computer all week, but maybe on Friday night he's scrumming for human contact, so he's out at the mall watching the latest disaster spectacle or cartoon.

I'd be more concerned about attention spans - if people lost the ability to conceive or imagine things such as history or other forms of behavior. Kids - at least the ones who aren't thinking - tend to want to see repetitive behavior that reinforces their sense of place, so they go and see the same kinds of movies over and over. But other kids go to movies because they want to dream. They want to get away from that other kind of behavior and see what other periods of time were like. They want to exercise their imaginations. That's why I read and I loved movies when I was a kid - to get away. Two lovers go to a movie because they want it to put them in the right mood so they can kiss, right? I mean there are all kinds of motives here. So basically a movie is fodder for kissing or laughing. [laughs] But I would like it to be fodder for dreaming.

Contemporary audiences don't seem very interested in older films. True. The big issue for me is behavior. It's important that kids see the Clark Gables and Cary Grants and those kinds of movies, and other kinds of behavior in other centuries through historical films, because at least they can see different ways of behaving. They shouldn't be consigned to their own present behavior. That's why I left the country when I was 19 - because I had to go outside myself. I went to Asia for the first time alone because I just wanted to see how other people behaved. Just because something's all around you doesn't make it right. That's why conformity sets in very quickly in our culture.

Americans embraced foreign films during the 50s, 60s, and 70s, but, after about 1980, all we wanted to see were American movies. I don't see it like that, but I know what you're saying. I think the audience in the 60s for European movies was always a part of an upper niche. Those films never really played in America.