Director Monte Hellman, at the 2010 Venice Film Festival.Cordon Press
With the death on Tuesday, April 20, of Monte Hellman, at the age of 91, a way of making films of which little remains in these times of Hollywood studios and platforms is leaving. The announcement of his death, at the Eisenhower medical center, in Palm Desert (California), was made by his daughter Melissa, who specified that her father had suffered a fall at home last week. His fascinating way of narrating the action, of which the great examples are the
paved road in two directions
(1971),
El tiroteo
(1966) or
Gallo de gallo
(1974), his ability to squeeze meager budgets - learned in his work with Roger Corman - and to make the most of faces such as Jack Nicholson, Warren Oates or Harry Dean Stanton made him become the example for later generations of creators of the
American
indie
and one of the references of Quentin Tarantino, of which he was executive producer in
Reservoir Dogs.
Original when allowed, in
Two-Way Paved Road he
tried a different ending than expected, thanks to a trick performed beyond the camera: the celluloid seems to burn, thus underlining the message of a film as different as it is fascinating.
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Outside the Hollywood law
Mount Hellman, movie doctor
Hellman was born Mount Himmelbaum in Brooklyn, New York, in 1929 and grew up in Albany, in the same state, where his father ran a small grocery store. When he was 6 years old, the family moved to Los Angeles. After studying Theater at Stanford University and Film at UCLA, and directing a summer theater and various jobs on the ABC network, as an editor, and in another theater, he joined the production company of Roger Corman, mythical creator of series cinema B. For him he directed
The Beast from the Cursed Cave
(1959), which Hellman - who had already changed his surname - described as
“Cayo Largo
with a monster ”. Corman must be thanked for training some of the later founders of the New Hollywood on the basis of ultra-fast shootings on a small budget: there they trained, for example, along with Hellman, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, John Sayles, Jack Nicholson. , Peter Fonda or Jonathan Demme. Under the umbrella of Corman, without appearing in the credits, Hellman not only directed, with the opening sequence
of Coppola's
Dementia 13
, as an example, but also assisted in the editing of
The Wildlings
(1960).
With Jack Nicholson, whom he had met in that film, Hellman formed a wonderful artistic couple: thus they arrived in 1964, shot both in the Philippines, and outside the world Corman, the war drama
Escape to Hell
and
Journey to Wrath
(with Nicholson's script).
Actor and director took to the west in 1966, filming
The Shooting
in Utah
(with Warren Oates)
and
Through the Hurricane,
again with the actor's script.
They are two dry works, which the critics baptize as existentialist thanks to their vital reflection, hidden under an austere image, far from mellifluous details and with characters doomed to failure and self-destruction.
In Hellman's career, his own works are mixed with his work as an uncredited editor (he worked on
Rafelson's
Head
;
Demme's
Fighting for My Rights
; or
Peckinpah's
The Aristocrats of Crime
), director of additional takes for films that they changed in their passage to television, finisher of filming of deceased directors (as in
Yo, el mejor,
the
biopic
of Muhammad Ali, or
The train of spies),
or second director of action sequences, as in
Robocop,
where it came in when Verhoeven began to rack up filming delay. In 1987, the filmmaker defined himself as follows: “I've always been a guy for hire. And I have usually taken whatever job they offered me. " Two years later, in an interview in EL PAÍS, he explained: "I am the trusted man of several production companies who, paradoxically, do not trust me when I present a project of their own to them."
But at other times he was able to show all his talent, and the best of the examples was
Asphalt Road in Two Directions
(1971), in which he had two musicians, James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, from The Beach Boys, and Warren Oates. The protagonists are two boys who travel the roads in a Chevrolet of the 55 in search of illegal races in which to compete. There is little else in their life, they hardly speak to each other and on their way through the southwestern United States they will cross GTO, a veteran driver who challenges them to see who gets to Washington first. The
road movie
was a failure at the box office because Universal decided not to invest in its promotion. But the press supported it and over time it became a cult film. For Richard Linklater, for example, “it is the purest
An
American
road movie
ever shot, it looks like a drive-in movie directed by a
nouvelle vague director
and is both the last film with the spirit of the sixties and the first with the soul of the seventies ”.
Monte Hellman receives a special Golden Lion from Quentin Tarantino at the Venice Film Festival in 2010 Franco Origli
His last feature film for the Corman factory came in 1974 with
Fighting Cocks,
again with Oates and Harry Dean Stanton, and from that moment on his films as a director have been distancing themselves in time. At the same time that he made a living from all kinds of jobs already mentioned, Hellman began teaching film classes at the California Institute of the Arts. Although his fame grew among the
American
indie
filmmakers
of the eighties and nineties, and in European critics, Hellman already directed only a handful more titles: the western
Clayton Drumm
(1978), with a very rare cast made up of Oates, Fabio Testi and Sam Peckinpah;
The iguana
(1988); the horror film
Mind-boggling Possession
(1989) and the chapter
Stanley's Girlfriend,
from the episodic film
Trapped Ashes
(2006).
Tarantino asked him to help him with
Reservoir Dogs
(1992), and for this he was one of the executive producers.
In 2010, he participated with his latest feature,
Road to Nowhere,
film noir with a desire to go further, at the Venice Film Festival, whose jury was chaired by Tarantino.
His disciple invented a special Golden Lion with which he recognized Hellman as a "great film artist and minimalist poet."
Although in that contest, for EL PAÍS, Hellman recalled: “When you work with a guy like Tarantino, he writes well what I'm going to say, the best thing is to strictly follow this advice: 'Get out of his way'.
If you do that, everything will be fine. "
