Free The Film Club by David Gilmour

before he or she becomes a huge movie star. Think of Samuel L. Jackson as a crackhead in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever (1991). You watch it for thirty seconds: “Who is that guy?” Or Winona Ryder’s tiny role in Beetlejuice (1988).
    Same thing, of course, for Sean Penn’s performance as a stoner in the high-school sex comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). Watch the way he looks at people when they’re talking to him. It’s as if he is deafened by the sound of white noise in his head and has a pillow squeezed between his ears. It’s not a leading role, but Penn stands so solidly in the middle of the film, his talent so authentic, so glaring, that everyone is reduced to a kind of backup singer (the same “greying” effect that Gary Cooper had on his fellow actors).
    â€œDo I have talent?” Jesse asked.
    â€œTons,” I said.
    â€œThat kind of talent?”
    What do you say? “The trick,” I said, “to having a happy life is being good at something. Do you suspect that you might be good at something?”
    â€œI don’t know what.”
    I tell him about André Gide, the French novelist, who wrote in his diary that it enraged him when, at the age of twenty, he walked down a Paris street and people couldn’t tell just by looking in his eyes the masterpieces he would produce.
    Jesse sat forward in his seat. “That’s exactly how I feel,” he said.
    What I didn’t mention was that it wasn’t until 1909— when Gide was almost forty—that he got the recognition he craved.
    I showed him Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday (1953). It was her first film as a lead, she was twenty-four, inexperienced, but her easy, comedic rapport with Gregory Peck seemed to spring from an inexplicable artistic maturity. How did she get so good so fast? And with that strange accent and a kind of emotional keenness, she is oddly reminiscent of Tolstoy’s romantic heroine, Natasha. But Ms. Hepburn also had that thing you can’t learn, an intuitive rapport with the camera, one successful, attractive gesture after another.
    I ask Jesse to again watch what happens when the camera settles on her face; it feels as if it has come to rest where it rightly belongs, as though drawn by gravity. Roman Holiday won her an Academy Award.
    I picked the debut of a young director as part of our “Talent Will Out” program. To this day, this largely forgotten little TV movie remains one of the most exhilarating pieces of youthful, look-at-me filmmaking I’ve ever seen.
    Movies for television tend not to be the domain of the brilliant, but seconds into Duel (1971), you can tell that something odd is going on. You see, from the driver’s point of view, a car leaving the pleasant suburbs of some American city and heading slowly out of town. It’s a hot day, blue sky; houses thin out; traffic thins out; the car is alone.
    Then, out of nowhere, a rusted, eighteen-wheel transport truck appears in the rearview mirror. Its windows are shaded. You never see the driver. You glimpse his cowboy boots, his hand waving out the window, but never his face.
    For seventy-four minutes, like a prehistoric monster, the truck chases the car through the sun-baked landscape. It is Moby Dick seeking out Ahab. Waiting by the roadside, hiding in gulleys, appearing to lose interest then suddenly reappearing, the truck is a vector of irrational evil; it is the hand-under-the-bed waiting to grab your ankle. But why? (Hint. Even at his young age, the director knew not to answer the question.)
    A truck and a car; no dialogue between them. Just running down the highway. How, I ask Jesse, could anyone animate such material? “Like squeezing wine from a rock,” he said.
    I suggest that the answer lies in the director’s visual attack. Duel compels you to look at it. It seems to say to the audience, There is something of primordial importance going on here; you have