I wouldn’t pre­sume to draw many com­par­isons between the work of Aki­ra Kuro­sawa and Wern­er Her­zog. There is, in both direc­tors, a rough, mas­culin­ist dar­ing that ful­ly explores the trag­ic lim­i­ta­tions and bloody con­se­quences of rough, mas­culin­ist dar­ing. This broad the­mat­ic com­mit­ment express­es itself in both artists’ films in wild­ly dif­fer­ent ways. Maybe what most con­nects them, and con­nects them to their ardent fans, is a shared writer­ly sen­si­bil­i­ty. Film may be fore­most a visu­al medi­um, yet—given the weight of thou­sands of years of oral and writ­ten sto­ry­telling that came before it—filmmakers can­not pro­duce great work with­out steep­ing them­selves in lit­er­a­ture.

Or, at least, that’s what both Kuro­sawa and Her­zog have argued—and who would con­tra­dict them? Film­mak­ing is a risky endeav­or in the best of cir­cum­stances. “It costs a great deal of mon­ey to make a film these days,” and becom­ing a direc­tor is “not so eas­i­ly accom­plished,” says Kuro­sawa in his inter­view offer­ing advice to aspir­ing film­mak­ers above. “If you gen­uine­ly want to make films,” he says, “then write screen­plays.” Where did the ideas for his screen­plays come from? From lit­er­a­ture. It’s impor­tant, he says, that film­mak­ers “do a cer­tain amount of read­ing. Unless you have a rich reserve with­in, you can’t cre­ate any­thing.”

Kuro­sawa adapt­ed the 1951 Rashomon, per­haps his most wide­ly acclaimed film, from two short sto­ries by Japan­ese writer Ryūno­suke Aku­ta­gawa, “Rashomon” (1915) and “In a Grove” (1921). 1985’s Ran is famous­ly “an East­ern retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear,” an author from whom Kuro­sawa learned much. He adapt­ed Dos­to­evsky, his favorite writer, in a Japan­ese con­text, and his 1957 film The Low­er Depths adapts a play by Max­im Gorky. Even his films that do not direct­ly trans­late anoth­er writer’s work still draw inspi­ra­tion from lit­er­ary sources. Read­ing leads to writ­ing, and to become an accom­plished film­mak­er, Kuro­sawa says in no uncer­tain terms, you must write.

This advice does not always go over well, he admits. Writ­ing is painful and dif­fi­cult, often a thank­less, unfor­giv­ing task with no imme­di­ate reward. “Still,” he says, para­phras­ing Balzac, “for writ­ers, includ­ing nov­el­ists, the most essen­tial and nec­es­sary thing is the for­bear­ance to face the dull task of writ­ing one word at a time.” One only learns how to do this by doing it—and by immers­ing one­self in the work of oth­ers who have done it. To suc­ceed as a sto­ry­teller, the basis of the director’s art, you must “write, write, write, and read.”

Her­zog, imply­ing the impor­tance of writ­ing more than stat­ing it out­right, begins and ends his advice to young aspi­rants above with the repeat­ed injunc­tion, “read, read, read, read,” and so on. “If you don’t read, you’ll nev­er be a film­mak­er.” Tech­ni­cal con­sid­er­a­tions are sec­ondary. Herzog’s Rogue Film School encour­ages stu­dents to “go absolute­ly and com­plete­ly wild”… by read­ing Hem­ing­way, Vir­gil, The Poet­ic Edda, and J.A. Baker’s The Pere­grine. (He also sug­gests The War­ren Com­mis­sion Report and Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s True His­to­ry of the Con­quest of New Spain.) Kuro­sawa does not offer spe­cif­ic sug­ges­tions. He grants that “cur­rent nov­els are fine, but one should read the clas­sics too.” The kinds of sto­ries these film­mak­ers rec­om­mend has much to do with their own tem­pera­ments and inter­ests; what­ev­er you might pre­fer to read in the course of your direc­to­r­i­al train­ing, Her­zog says you must read as much as pos­si­ble, and, Kuro­sawa adds, you must write, write, write, and write some more.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wern­er Her­zog Cre­ates Required Read­ing & Movie View­ing Lists for Enrolling in His Film School

Wern­er Herzog’s Rogue Film School: Apply & Learn the Art of Gueril­la Film­mak­ing & Lock-Pick­ing

How Did Aki­ra Kuro­sawa Make Such Pow­er­ful & Endur­ing Films? A Wealth of Video Essays Break Down His Cin­e­mat­ic Genius

Aki­ra Kurosawa’s List of His 100 Favorite Movies

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Orson Welles died more than 30 years ago, and his last fea­ture film F for Fake came out fif­teen years before that. But we’ll now have to revise our notions of where his fil­mog­ra­phy ends, since his long-unfin­ished project The Oth­er Side of the Wind just debuted at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val in advance of its Novem­ber 2nd release. Shot between 1970 and 1976, a process pro­longed by numer­ous finan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties, the film was first thrust into lim­bo in its third year of edit­ing by the Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, as some of its financ­ing had come from the Shah’s broth­er-in-law. The light at the end of The Oth­er Side of the Wind’s decades-long tun­nel of own­er­ship com­pli­ca­tions, when it final­ly appeared, took a form even Welles could nev­er have imag­ined: Net­flix.

The Oth­er Side of the Wind stars acclaimed film direc­tor John Hus­ton as an acclaimed film direc­tor named Jake Han­naford, recent­ly returned to Amer­i­ca after years of self-exile in Europe. An old-school rel­ic in the 1970s’ “New Hol­ly­wood” era, a time when a younger gen­er­a­tion of film­mak­ers like Mar­tin Scors­ese, Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, and Ter­rence Mal­ick used the major stu­dios to real­ize per­son­al visions at a large cin­e­mat­ic scale, Han­naford tries to make a come­back with a coun­ter­cul­ture pic­ture of his own. Filled with long takes of vast land­scapes, mod­ern archi­tec­ture, a lone motor­cy­cle rid­er, and gra­tu­itous nudi­ty, this film-with­in-the-film, also called The Oth­er Side of the Wind, takes its cues not just from the New Hol­ly­wood kids but from Michelan­ge­lo Anto­nioni and the oth­er Euro­pean film­mak­ers then in vogue as well.

The “real” The Oth­er Side of the Wind, of which you can get a taste in the trail­er above, takes a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent tack, using doc­u­men­tary-style shoot­ing, quick cut­ting, and oscil­la­tion between col­or and black and white. This lay­er­ing of dif­fer­ent styles comes with a lay­er­ing of dif­fer­ent eras, each com­ment­ing on the oth­ers: the 1930s and 1940s that shaped Welles as a film­mak­er (and that Welles shaped as a peri­od in cin­e­ma), the New-Hol­ly­wood 1970s, and the present day, when a com­pa­ny like Net­flix has the clout to make projects hap­pen for any direc­tor, liv­ing or dead. The col­lab­o­ra­tion to com­plete the film involved new par­tic­i­pants as well as those who’d worked on it in the 1970s, like Welles asso­ciate Peter Bog­danovich, who played a film­mak­er in The Oth­er Side of the Wind not long after becom­ing a film­mak­er him­self.

Numer­ous oth­er direc­tors also appear in the film, from Gold­en-Age Hol­ly­wood jour­ney­man Nor­man Fos­ter to French New Wave fig­ure Claude Chabrol to coun­ter­cul­tur­al icon Den­nis Hop­per. As for Han­naford, a line in the trail­er describes him as “the Hem­ing­way of cin­e­ma,” the kind of macho artist who had long intrigued Welles, per­haps ever since he met and clashed with Hem­ing­way him­self. “He’s been reject­ed by all his old friends,” Welles once said of the Han­naford char­ac­ter in a pre­vi­ous ver­sion of the film. “He’s final­ly been shown up to be a kind of voyeur… a fel­low who lives off oth­er peo­ple’s dan­ger and death.” He put it more blunt­ly to Hus­ton in a quote that appears in Josh Karp’s book Orson Welles’s Last Movie: The Mak­ing of The Oth­er Side of the Wind: “It’s a film about a bas­tard direc­tor. It’s about us, John. It’s a film about us.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Orson Welles’ First Ever Film, Direct­ed at Age 19

Dis­cov­er the Lost Films of Orson Welles

F for Fake: Orson Welles’ Short Film & Trail­er That Was Nev­er Released in Amer­i­ca

Watch Orson Welles’ Trail­er for Cit­i­zen Kane: As Inno­v­a­tive as the Film Itself

Orson Welles Remem­bers his Stormy Friend­ship with Ernest Hem­ing­way

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

One of the won­der­ful things about David Lynch is that, despite inter­views, sev­er­al doc­u­men­taries on his cre­ative process, plen­ty of behind-the-scenes footage of him direct­ing, and the release of a whole memoir/biography told both sub­jec­tive­ly *and* objectively…despite all that, the man is still an enig­ma. Even when he returned 25 years lat­er to famil­iar ground with the third sea­son of Twin Peaks, there was no sign of self-par­o­dy, and he deliv­ered some of the most bril­liant work of his career. How the hell does he do it?

That being said, if you have read his book Catch­ing the Big Fish or have heard him in inter­views, this short film direct­ed by his son Austin Lynch and Case Sim­mons, and pre­sent­ed by Stel­la McCart­ney, might not be any­thing new. If you are just now dis­cov­er­ing Lynch, then this is a quick primer on his cre­ative process and his devo­tion to Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion as a way to dive into that cre­ativ­i­ty and, even­tu­al­ly, bring peace to the world.

Austin Lynch is one of three Lynch chil­dren to work in enter­tain­ment. The eldest Jen­nifer Lynch direct­ed Box­ing Hele­na and wrote the Twin Peaks spin-off book The Secret Diary of Lau­ra Palmer. Riley Lynch is a musi­cian and appeared in two episodes of the recent Twin Peaks.

Giv­en the pedi­gree, Lynch and Sim­mons man­age to hon­or David Lynch with­out copy­ing his style. The short abstract pro­file also fea­tures very short cameos by Stel­la McCart­ney, Børns, Lola Kirk, and sev­er­al oth­ers.

The direc­tor appears here and there dur­ing the nine min­utes, back­lit by sub­tle col­ored lights in a pri­vate screen­ing room, watch­ing a movie. What movie? It doesn’t mat­ter.

“It’s so mag­i­cal, I don’t know why, to go into a the­ater and have the lights go down,” Lynch says. “It’s very qui­et and then the cur­tains start to open. And then you go into a world.”

The direc­tors link this to a famil­iar Lynch tale of the begin­ning of his film career, when Lynch was paint­ing at the begin­ning of his art school years and the can­vas start­ed to move and make sounds. No mat­ter how many times Lynch tells this sto­ry, there’s some­thing so odd about it. Is he talk­ing in metaphor? Did he hal­lu­ci­nate? Did he get vis­it­ed by a force beyond this real­i­ty? Are his great­est Lynchi­an moments his way of try­ing to make sense of that one episode?

He also talks about the cir­cle that goes from the film to the audi­ence and back, a feed­back loop that musi­cians also talk about, and is the rea­son Lynch still loves the cin­e­ma as an event space. Per­for­mance spaces fig­ure promi­nent­ly in his works, whether it’s the Club Silen­cio in Mul­hol­land Dr., the Lady in the Radi­a­tor in Eraser­head, or the var­i­ous lodges and per­for­mance areas in Twin Peaks. (It’s also why he despis­es watch­ing films on iPhones, apart from the size.)

Lynch explains here how he became a film­mak­er through study­ing med­i­ta­tion, how it saved him from anger and despair, and how these tech­niques led to land­ing big­ger cre­ative fish from “the ocean of solu­tions” and expand­ing artis­tic intu­ition.

Is Lynch enlight­ened? No, but he’s clos­er than most of us:

“Every day for me gets bet­ter and bet­ter,” he con­cludes. “And I believe that enliven­ing uni­ty in the world will bring peace on earth. So I say peace to all of you.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes a David Lynch Film Lynchi­an: A Video Essay

Hear David Lynch Read from His New Mem­oir Room to Dream, and Browse His New Online T‑Shirt Store

Watch All of the Com­mer­cials That David Lynch Has Direct­ed: A Big 30-Minute Com­pi­la­tion

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.