After a two-decade absence, legendary filmmaker Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop, Cockfighter) returns to feature-film directing this weekend with the movie-within-a-movie noir Road to Nowhere. Technically, it's more like a movie within a movie within a movie, at least when it comes to Hellman's favorite scene, which he shared today with Movieline.
At a key point in Road to Nowhere, a movie director and his leading lady (who also happen to be lovers) follow up a long day's shoot with a viewing of Victor Erice's 1973 classic The Spirit of the Beehive. "What a fuckin' masterpiece," the director says at the end. It's just one of many semi-autobiographical fragments populating Hellman's own film; after all, the sequence of young Ana tending to a wounded fighter during the Spanish Civil War is the cult hero's own favorite scene.
"The scene I go back to over and over again," Hellman explained, "is one of the scenes we show from Spirit of the Beehive -- with her tying the shoelaces and hearing the sound of the musical watch. There's something that happens involuntarily in that little girl's forehead. It's one of those magic moments of an actor appearing to experience something for the first time. Acting is reacting. I don't know how you achieve that with a 6-year-old girl, but Victor Erice did it. That's one of the most astounding moments, and her forehead doing this kind of expansion or whatever it does."
But why include it in Road to Nowhere?
"Just because it's my favorite scene!"
Fair enough! Find below a rare glimpse available online, and drop back by Movieline tomorrow for our full-length interview with Monte Hellman.