Mount Hellman

Monte Jay Himmelman –his birth name– was born on July 12, 1929, in New York, although his family moved to Los Angeles when he was 5 years old. He studied Drama at Stanford University, and Cinematography at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He started his journey, like other great filmmakers (among them  Francis Ford Coppola , Martin Scorsese  and  Jonathan Demme ), at the Roger Corman factory . “I started in exploitation films with little money, but with a personal bias. I learned from Cormanto produce commercially viable films, while remaining faithful to my personal vision”, he would recall in an interview. “He also taught me how useless it was to prepare budgets. He would give you $75,000 and tell you to make a movie, so you got by no matter what. It is a pity that today there is no  Corman who supports young people.”

He made his debut in this house with the horror film The Beast from the Cursed Cave,  and directed several sequences of El terror, signed by his mentor, with a cast that included Jack Nicholson , who would become the fetish actor at the beginning of his career. . He would appear again in Journey to the Wrath , Escape to Hell and the solid westerns  The Gunfight  and  Through the Hurricane , one of Monte Hellman ‘s best – known films .  “I love working with good players like Jack Nicholson. Actors are less flexible than cameramen or directors,” he declared. “An actor really only has himself, and if you choose a certain actor you have to accept what he has to give you. Hopefully, you’ll select one whose style suits the role he’s playing. I don’t mean that his personality fits the role. I mean that his acting style suits the role. Some actors are more theatrical and some are more documentary in style.”

He became a cult director with the excellent Two-Way Paved Road, where James Taylor  and Warren Oates played two drivers engaged in an illegal race across the territory of the United States. “It could be done because for 10 seconds in the history of cinema the studios gave authors the freedom to do whatever they wanted, and the film was the product of that happy situation. Today Hollywood is controlled by people who don’t know about movies,” he said. “”The experience of making movies for me is one of constant discovery. If I know too much in advance, I tend to lose interest beforehand. The ideal situation for me is to work on a film like Two-Way Paved Road., where so many unpredictable things happened in the making of it that even after editing and mixing and final printing is done, I can rewatch the film and still find new things in it. That for me is an exhilarating experience. I like working on a movie like that, which is constantly revealing its secrets to me. I believe that any work of art, not just a movie, is a mystery. I think it was Jean Cocteau who said that he should reveal his secrets slowly.  Although it failed in its commercial exhibition, it has been gaining favor over the years, just like Fighting Cocks . The French magazines  Cahiers du Cinéma  and  Positif they extolled him as an avant-garde American filmmaker. “I didn’t know he was doing something new and original until the French told me.”

However, crashing at the box office cut short his career, which is why he had great difficulties releasing his titles. In 1988,  Monte Hellman  produced the thriller La iguana ,  an adaptation of a best-seller by Alberto Vázquez Figueroa with an Italian production.around Oberlus, a sailor with a face deformed by a congenital disease that makes him look like a lizard; His classmates contemptuously nickname him “La Iguana”. “He had a very difficult shoot, because the producer wasn’t really a movie producer,” he lamented. “He didn’t understand that he had to pay people in advance to be at a certain place at a certain time with the materials needed to make the movie. He’d say, ‘If you come tomorrow morning I’ll give you your money.’ Well, no. nobody came. We often just sat there, waiting for eight hours because we couldn’t film anything. Very frustrating and very difficult.” He served as a second unit director for Paul Verhoeven ‘s Robocop ., and finished two feature films whose directors were killed in the middle of filming, Spy Train , which was started by Mark Robson , and The Greatest, a Muhammad Ali biography, which had been started by Tom Gries .

In addition, Monte Hellman helped Quentin Tarantino get Reservoir Dogs off the ground, where he is credited as a producer. ” My main role was to raise the money, which I was very good at. My secondary role was to get Quentin Tarantino to act in the film, which was not a problem because I knew exactly what I wanted to do. If I found out I was making small mistakes, I would let him know. And he would always say, well, that was my intention. [Laughs] He believes in himself, and for good reason. I didn’t even have to go on set every day.I went three times a week, but I saw the daily shots every night”, he recalls. He assures that he did not teach Quentin Tarantino as many things as he affirms. ” I only pointed out some technical issues. There is one thing that is difficult for any new director to learn and that is the axis. Whenever he violated that, he pointed it out to him. But it is bright, natural. I can’t take credit for it.”

Divorced in 1971 from actress Jaclyn Hellman, with whom he had two children, Monte Hellman  was joined by fellow performer Barboura Morris and director Emma Webster, who accompanied him until his death. In 2010 he completed the romantic thriller Road to Nowhere , which competed for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, where later that year he would receive a special award for his career ensemble. From that moment he dedicated himself to teaching classes at the California Institute of Arts, although he never stopped fighting to carry out new projects.