A summertime question for David Lowery.

David's Drifting: A Director's Log has been a bookmark (and then an early feed) for ages. Click here and you'll see why I asked David, "Does Kevin Smith get Star Wars?"

I think he does. Notwithstanding the fact that his appreciation of the films was validated by George Lucas himself on the Episode II: Attack of the Clones commentary track, I feel that he gets the trilogy - or, indeed, the sextet - in the same way that I do, which as far as I'm concerned is as got as getting gets without getting scary. When I hear him talk about the films, I feel like I'm listening to myself (or, rather, a more vulgar version of myself). It's really rather discomfiting; that rare sort of connectivity one sometimes finds in conjunction with a person who is otherwise on an almost entirely different plane of existence.

Okay, that's a bit of an overstatement. I've told more than my fair of filthy jokes in my time; I used to not know who Eric Rohmer was; I loved Chasing Amy when I was a heartsick eleventh grader. My point, though, is that I won't go out of my way to defend Kevin Smith in regards to much of anything but his getting of Star Wars. He gets it in a way that is, I think, sincere and genuine, with room for neither illusions nor apologies (unlike his own work, which I find rife with both).

Smith has written at length about the films, but there was one piece in particular that I wanted to bring up here - only to discover that it's apparently no longer available online (if anyone has it or can find it, please link to it in the comments below [I remember it; it was amazing and should be archived somewhere; anyone? -dwh]). It was a transcript of a conversation that ran in Empire Online last year. The participants were Smith, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg (both of Shaun of the Dead fame), and they riffed for over an hour (and many, many unedited pages) on nothing but their love of Star Wars. It was a beautiful thing.

Pegg and Wright, they get it, too; it's not about appraising specific films, or parts of the films, or whether or not the extended universe is legitimate or whether the Special Editions are a travesty; none of that really matters, because this sort of love is based on a rarified sort of personal relationship to the material. Wright talked about how he openly wept the first time he saw each of the prequel trailers. I don't think I went that far, although I think my response was at least equivocal - I was too overjoyed when I saw those trailers to do anything but smile. It didn't matter how disappointing the preceding prequel might have been; those previews bent time - but I digress. I'm supposed to be talking about Kevin Smith's love of Star Wars and not my own (even though I think they're mostly the same love, expressed slightly differently). On that note, I recall reading Smith's appraisal of the Phantom Menace trailer, which he caught a glimpse of while mixing one of his films at Skywalker Ranch. I got chills reading about his chills, and it's somewhat disappointing to think that, should I ever get the chance to mix something of my own at the Ranch, there won't be anything left for me to get a sneak peek at.

Thinking about Smith - and Wright, and Pegg, and myself, and every other filmmaker whose fate was sealed by a lightsaber - has got me marveling a bit at how so many disparate auteurs might share such a common, uniform bond, and how invisible that bond might be. Generally speaking, when filmmakers love a particular film or a director and wish to openly display that affection, they do so through homage. All one must do to know that PT Anderson loves Altman and Demme is watch one of his films; the same goes for David Gordon Green and Terrence Malick, Jonathan Glazer and Kubrick, De Palma and Hitchcock. Same old, same old. But no matter how much of an influence Star Wars might have had, no one ever talks about how they "ripped off that great shot in Empire," you know? This sort of inspiration is of a deeper, more primal, slightly disjointed, deeply nostalgic sort, and it is honored not through a particular style of filmmaking, but through the act of filmmaking itself. Directors that love Star Wars show it simply by making movies - they're paying homage to the dream that was ignited by the sight of that opening crawl all those years ago, the first glimpse of the Tantiv IV Rebel Blockade Runner and the Imperial Star Destroyer tearing across the screen, the first echo of Darth Vader's breathing (and, depending on one's age and orientation, perhaps the sustained sight of Leia in her slave girl outfit, too). It's something implicit in the work that is never acknowledged; it doesn't need to be; you don't need to wear it on your sleeve.

Unless you're Smith, of course, in which case your films afford you the luxury to base many a famous monologue on trivialities in the Star Wars universe (including, apparently, an epic argument in Clerks II, which I haven't seen yet), and you cast Mark Hamill in one of your films, and you cast yourself opposite Mark Hamill in a lightsaber duel.

Reader, I'll admit: every now and then, I wish my work had room for the same.

Posted by dwhudson at August 8, 2006 3:23 AM