David Thomson is the author of numerous books on film, most notably The Biographical Dictionary of Film and has also written for New York Times, Film Comment, Movieline, The New Republic, Salon, The Independent and The Guardian.
His latest is Have You Seen…? and in it he writes about 1000 of the films that he has particularly liked – or in some cases, hated – from the earliest classics of cinema to the present day.
I recently spoke to David about the book and we had a lengthy discussion including the following:
- How this differs from The Biographical Dictionary of Film
- The layout of one film entry per page
- How David first got into writing about film
- The task of reviewing the films for this book
- There Will Be Blood and the work of Paul Thomas Anderson
- Se7en and David Fincher
- Goodfellas and Martin Scorcese
- The ‘golden era’ of the 1970s
- Why Citizen Kane is consistently voted the greatest film of all time
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Films that David has changed his mind on
- The state of film criticism
- The differences between American and English film culture
- What David hopes readers will get out of this book
You can listen to the interview here:
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You can also download it as a podcast via iTunes by clicking here.
Have You Seen…? is out today and is published by Allen Lane
> Download this interview as an MP3 file
> Buy Have You Seen…? at Amazon UK
> David Thomson’s recent articles at The Guardian
> Official page for the book at Penguin
