Director and screenwriter Philip Kaufman was born in Chicago, Illinois. He attended the University of Chicago and later Harvard Law School. He won the Prix de la Nouvelle Critique at Cannes in 1965 for his film Goldstein (1964). He was the screenwriter for The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and was to direct it but was replaced as director by Clint ...
Whereas European films have traditionally been able to go into adult relationships. I think there's a huge audience in America for those kinds of films.
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What's really interesting about that is that a lot of these words that were incendiary in their time now seem almost harmless and laughable, because they have this archaic quality.
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To me, thoughts are fun and art is fun. The strength of our society should not be idle entertainments but the joy of pursuing ideas.
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Similarly, the Marquis is presented in this film as someone who would disturb the status quo and therefore must be kept imprisoned.
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Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
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You can have a lot of unhappiness by not having money, but the reverse is no guarantee of happiness.
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They are always very lax about putting restrictions on violence for children's movies, which I think is much more harrowing than sexuality for children.
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The danger is not so much in the economic structure of a society but in its intellectual structure.
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I read, therefore I'm interested in writers.
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I mean San Francisco is not only the home of a lot of these great noir films or psychological thrillers, if you will, like Vertigo, but also great cop movies. Whether it's Dirty Harry (1971) or Bullitt (1968). In this movie I wanted to sort of combine those two genres, you know that's what the script called for. But you know, there's always a danger nowadays that films are gonna be brought up to Canada for budget reasons. And that's something that really concerns me. I'd love to make all my movies here if the subject matter was right. When I did Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) and The Right Stuff (1983) here, I thought I'd be making those great careers like Woody Allen where you get to shoot a movie in your own city every year. Nowadays they either want to move the film to Canada or in some cases they go to Prague or Romania or they want to keep 'em down in L.A. This one, even though it called for San Francisco, I think they wanted to initially shoot part of the film up here, you know get the exteriors and then go back to L.A. We really fought to get it up here and I think Paramount was really pleased. We had a great crew up here, we were on schedule and way under budget. I want more movies to come here.[2004]
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The truth is, I'm drawn to all kinds of things.
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And I liked this extreme character of de Sade.
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But you know, there's always a danger nowadays that films are gonna be brought up to Canada for budget reasons. And that's something that really concerns me.
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It just seemed to me to be a great story, set back in its time but something that seemed to have relevance for our time. Now that the film is coming out, it looks like we're back in another time where repression of expression is all the rage.
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That's a little homage in a way to that and also to create that sort of creepy atmosphere that Hitchcock did. Vertigo (1958) was one of his great movies that was shot right here in The City [San Francisco] and it's about a woman and the psychological twists and so forth.[2004]
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[on Ashley Judd's character driving a jet black Mustang in Twisted (2004)] That's a direct homage to Bullitt (1968). And we looked a lot at Steve McQueen. In a way we wanted to have a woman character with the kind of energy that Steve McQueen had. Even though Steve McQueen was a huge star in his day, my feeling is that he was underrated. Now that Steve McQueen's gone, we miss him. I don't know of anybody who has that kind of kinetic energy that he brought to bear in movies like that.[2004]
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I shot a lot of close-ups on this movie 'cause there's like a dual mystery, she's searching through her haunted past to find some truth and she's also following an external mystery where she comes to think she might be the killer.
He spent 8 months in the mid-1970s working on a script for a Star Trek movie. At this same time, his friend George Lucas was making the first Star Wars film. Due to the poor buzz surrounding Star Wars prior to its release, Paramount decided to pull the plug on Kaufman's Star Trek project, with one of the studio executives saying "there's no future in science fiction." His script, which centered on the character of Spock, was abandoned and Paramount went in another direction when they resumed production on the first Star Trek film following the success of Star Wars.
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Met Anaïs Nin in 1962. Later, in 1990, he made a movie called Henry & June (1990) about her, her affairs with Henry Miller, and his wife June.
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Tosca Cafe, of which he is a frequent visitor, in San Francisco's North Beach has various photos depicting the filmmaker. Kaufman is a San Francisco resident whose office is located in the same area.
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Biography in John Wakeman, editor. "World Film Directors, Volume Two, 1945-1985," pp. 492-495. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.
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Worked with George Lucas developing Lucas' "Indiana Jones" project, coming up with the basic story of the search for the Ark of the Covenant, leading to his story credit on Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).
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Runs his production company Walrus & Associates out of San Francisco with his family.
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