In an interview on Making Movies

Your next choice is Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

An incredibly delicious read—just a great, great account of that era from Easy Rider (’69) through the mid-’70s.  It’s the story of all those great filmmakers—my icons—Scorsese, Coppola, Friedkin, and Bogdanovich.  They changed the way movies were made in America.  It recounts their adventures in making movies. 

When I read it, I was on a boat near the Great Barrier Reef.  I’d gone to the Melbourne Film Festival to promote my first movie, Pi.  So it was probably ’98. 

Having just started my career—having just been to Sundance and just begun to feel like a real filmmaker, part of this generation of Sundance filmmakers—reading about this earlier generation of filmmakers, which most of the Sundance filmmakers base themselves on, it just resonated with me.

It was interesting to see how certain directors had navigated a long career and others had burnt out really quickly. The players in Hollywood change all the time, but the town never changes.  And that’s the truth. It’s different people, but the same characters are always emerging. So it was an education—and a really great read. 

Do today’s directors get as much artistic freedom as they did in the era that the author, Peter Biskind, was writing about?

I think that was really a golden era of filmmaking.  They were doing things that no one had ever done before, and they really had the run of the show.  Within the studio system, it doesn’t really work that way any more.  But in independent filmmaking, of course, you’re outside the system, so you have ultimate freedom.  Today, the independent sphere mirrors what was happening in studios in the early ’70s.  Except we generally have less money to play with.