DEFINITION March 2019

FEATURE | ROBERT R I CHARDSON I NTERV I EW

Andrei Rublev , Ivan’s Childhood , The Earrings of Madame de, Shane, Giant, Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Leopard, T Men, The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, Heaven’s Gate, The Decalogue, Rome, Open City, M, The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, Stagecoach, Tokyo Story, Vertigo, The Sorrow and the Pity, Annie Hall, Man with a Movie Camera, Dog Star Man, Battleship Potemkin, Jaws, All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, Star Wars, The Wizard of Oz, The Killing Fields, Blade Runner, Clockwork Orange, La Jetée, Pather Panchali, Bicycle Thieves .” INSPIRED BY BERGMAN “Bergman’s work was the event that single handedly turned me from someone who was perplexed about the future to someone sharply focused on learning as much about film as possible.” At Rhode Island School of Design, Richardson received his BFA and at the American Film Institute, he received an MFA. “Film became my life and my greatest love,” he continues, declaring his fascination with The Battle of Algiers as well as Marcel Ophüls’ The Sorrow and the Pity . “When it comes to choosing what to work on, first of all I want to know who is

the war. That was my first time under fire. That experience helped feed my knowledge and gave me a base on which to stand when I filmed Salvador and Platoon . It was invaluable. Furthermore, I learned to believe in my intuition. That is one of the perspectives I attempt to share with anyone asking what is most important when it comes to working in this business. That and perseverance.” HOW TO SURVIVE Richardson continues, “The industry can be a cruel beast. One needs to hold on to one’s sanity and ride out the storm. And there are many storms. Between the storms there is silence. Then there is down time. It can be quite long. You have to believe in yourself as well as maintain a strong support team. Within those empty hours you begin to evaluate what it is you want, who you are, what needs to be resolved – are you talented, are you in the right mental and spiritual state? Never take a job you are not certain you can do with great skill. One needs to focus on what is the primary goal and then to listen to your inner self on how to achieve that goal. There is no easy path. Patience, talent, luck and intuition.”

the director,” Richardson continues. “Then how strong the script and the story are. Marie Colvin was central to why I decided to make A Private War . With Matt, we had to decide what was the best visual path. We made a decision to stay within the documentary framework. Cinema verité was a word that kept appearing in our conversations. Keep it real and as unlit as possible, except for the dream sequences. We had 36 or 37 days with a $10 million budget and it was all on location in Jordan or London.” “One of the first films I made was Crossfire, a documentary about the war in Salvador. This influenced greatly my work on A Private War and far earlier on Salvador with Oliver Stone. On Crossfire I was asked by Jeff Harmon to shoot with the military while a French crew were to cover the guerillas. My politics were not in agreement with military, but I knew that the experience was intuitively the correct decision. I shot interviews with the death squads and the military. Somewhere into a month of shooting, as we were ending our filming, we heard that the French crew had to leave the country and I was asked by their director to start shooting with the guerillas, so in the end I shot both sides of

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