I don't think any person's path is the same as any others. I grew up watching a lot of movies. I didn't know that could be a profession until I went to college to study in a very different area. There was a course on film appreciation, and that made me realize you could study film. And I started studying, reading, collecting books on cinema. I was very influenced by Hitchcock, Truffaut, a book of interviews that Truffaut did with Alfred Hitchcock. I didn't go to undergraduate cinema school, and I didn't go to graduate cinema school. I wanted to remain interdisciplinary. And then I started writing about American cinema. My first post-dissertation book was on American film of the 1940s. And it's sort of similar to what I was just saying about wanting to see other films of the 70s. When I was in college, everybody was talking about film noir and how film noir was THE genre of the 1940s. I sort of thought that too, but I needed to see some other things, and I started to see films that didn't fit the genre of noir, and sometimes seemed almost the opposite of noir. They had cynical, downbeat, tough guys, but who redeemed themselves, almost in a way like Roy Neary in Close Encounters. So I started thinking about other aspects of the 40s, and saw about 20% of 40s films, just to get a range of what was going on between the war period and the post-war.

In the 80s, when I started as a professor, the BFI asked if I wanted to work on the noir film In a Lonely Place. That was my first BFI. Then, I wrote about other things, I did a book on the history of film study, but I just love the BFI books. Next I wrote about Pulp Fiction. That one is curious because I deliberately wanted to write it in a way where you can't tell if I like Pulp Fiction or not. Some people think it's scandalous and rough. There was a woman who was yelling, “fascist, fascist.” Then there were other people who loved Quentin (calling him by his first name in fan admiration). So I wrote the book trying to address both sides, and I hope you can't tell from the book whether I like the film or not. I mean you have to be interested in something to write about it, but interest isn't the same as liking. People who write on fascism don't have to like fascism.

In Close Encounters, I wanted to present all the arguments. The standard argument is either it's great because it's all about special effects, or it's like Star Wars and mindless because it's all about special effects. I try to complicate that by this idea that it's a transition film, and it has some of the earlier 70s, and it has some of the later 70s. It's Paul Schrader and George Lucas combined, in a way. In Goodfellas (my next BFI book) I don't ever say this is a great film. You can sense the things I like about it, you can sense some of the limitations of it. In Close Encounters we're supposed to like Roy Neary at the end, and we're supposed to be happy for him finding happiness. I think we're not supposed to like Henry for much of the film, but we're also supposed to pity him for being stuck in a kind of suburban hell. I think it's a morally ambiguous film. Joe Pesci’s character does terrible things in the film. But he's also, like, the funniest character in it. And he has charisma. There's this famous scene where Henry says, “you're funny,” and he goes, “Funny how? Am I a clown?” And you think he might suddenly explode. If you watch the people in the back—other people in the restaurant—at first they're kind of scared, they're like “who is this jerk?” Then when he makes a joke, and they all start laughing. They've been won over, just as maybe we've been won over. So I think it's a film that plays on us and puts us in a very ambivalent situation, as we are with Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, as we are with Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull.

When I work on any film, the first time I see it, I don't take notes, I just try and watch it. Now, of course, I'm already watching it as a film professor, but I try to be as open to it as possible, and then if I want to go back and take notes and do other things. I try and be as innocent as possible. But then when I know I'm gonna work on a film, I watch it a lot. I will watch it maybe 30, 40 times. I watched Close Encounters with kids and with adults to see what moved them. I did one screening with nothing but kids. I had four kids watching it with me, and I thought they were going to get scared by the scene in the house where the aliens are coming through the floor, coming through the chimney. They were like, “we've seen that, we watch Nightmare on Elm Street.” What they were scared about was “will my dad leave me?” That was the kind of thing. “Will the family fall apart?” There is the mashed potato scene—in ’77, a lot of people were laughing at it—but I think it's a very painful scene. The kids are watching their dad fall apart.

Finally, I'm at a stage of my career where I can sort of pick what I want to do. Now I can write about my interests. I have a side interest in food and culinary things, so I did a book on Julia Child and her TV show, The French Chef. It connects to my film stuff because it's about media, but also connects to the food, and I did some of her recipes and things like that.

‍