"If you're [in your] late teens, early twenties, I think you relate to it a lot," says Duke of A PLACE IN THE SUN, in which Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift play young lovers.
"I'm Costello in my heart, but I probably act more like Abbott," the director says of his connections with the performers. Filled with all the spooky monsters that he loves, this is a classic Duke returns to every Halloween.
Working at a video store after film school may be a cliché, but the job introduced him to Henning Carlsen's HUNGER. He calls actor Per Oscarsson's turn as struggling writer Pontus "one of the greatest cinematic performances of all time."
Duke recalls crawling behind the couch to catch a glimpse of the forbidden images of LADY IN WHITE. "It was a popular new release at the time in the '80s, but it hasn't stood the test of time in people's minds. I absolutely love it."
Duke cites this horror fantasy for its fabricated experience. "It feels dreamlike because you can tell on some level that this place doesn't really exist anywhere, which makes it magical because it only exists in the world of the movie."
"When you can actually physically build that world and you can see the fingerprints of the artisans, it's like you can feel the brushstrokes. To me, it's imbued with more soul."
The beautiful animation of THE SECRET OF NIMH changed the course of the medium, pushing the boundaries for backgrounds, effects and lighting, and launching director Don Bluth as a creator of childhood favorites.
Duke takes us to the ANOMALISA set, explaining the inspiration behind the character of Michael and the attention to detail required to create each frame of stop-motion animation: "It can take more than a day to get a single second."
To calibrate the emotional and technical aspects of a stop-motion sex scene, director Duke Johnson turned to professional sex workers, whose rehearsals mapped out precise sequencing and accidental gestures that felt authentic to life.
