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Hey, folks, Welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, it is the return of Alicia Malone. We talked with her a few years ago about one of her previous books. We also had her on the episode all about Deep End, and now she is back with a new book, tcm Imports, Timeless, Favorit's and Hinde Gems of World Cinema. The book includes fifty two reviews of some amazing films from around the world, including a lot of titles that you might not have
expected to see. Is that your typical eight and a half lestrata type of book. It actually digs a little bit deeper, shows you a whole lot of great movies and Alicia's writing is just fantastic, very very pleasurable to read. Highly recommended. I know it's April when we're talking about this. This is going to be a great Christmas gift if you haven't bought it for yourself or a friend by the end of the year. But I would say, go ahead,
pick this up. You're really gonna enjoy it. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed the interview. I'm trying to remember when we did that Deepend episode. That's been a few years.
It's been a while, and I was just looking at it in my David eight collection the other day. I was like, oh, yeah, Deepend. I forgot about that movie. But that was back when I lived in La Now I'm over in May. All different worlds, cold but beautiful.
I'm excited to talk to you about your latest book. This is the fourth one, I think.
Fourth book, but first one with TCM.
How did you get this assignment and how did you decide what movies you were going to cover for this?
Yeah, that was the interesting thing because I was approached by Running Press, who do the TTM Library books, to come up with a book I could do for their library, and I thought I wanted to do something based around foreign film because of the TCM Imports section that I host on TCM.
But the hard part was how do you.
Narrow it down what kind of lens do you give this book? And I didn't want to do the greatest films of all time? So I thought about the way that I liked to watch films, and that is really seasonal. I love watching four films in fall and Christmas films.
At the end of the year. So I thought about doing it that way.
That was how they programmed TCM imports, and in doing so, I ended up with a real eclectic list of films that aren't necessarily all my favorite, but they're really interesting and wide ranging, and that's what I like about it, the strange list, and I like it.
I would be hard pressed to think of a movie like Bicycle Thieves and say this belongs in the summer, the spring, and the fall.
Some were like more obvious and than some were just like the vibe.
And I love this whole idea too, that you are a PCM import, so what you consider foreign film is way different than what I consider foreign film.
Yeah, exactly.
I would say Hollywood films are foreign films for me growing up in Australia. But I tried to think about it in terms of international cinema rather than just foreign film because I didn't want it to be non English speaking films only. I had to include some from Australia, some from the UK, from a New Zealand, so basically it's just non Hollywood films.
Yeah, that must have been a little difficult to think of your native Australia as being a foreign land.
Yeah, exactly. It doesn't feel foreign to me.
And that was the great part about growing up in Australia was that I felt like we had access to world cinema at your local movie theater. It wasn't just Hollywood films, although Hollywood definitely dominate all the movie theaters in Australia, but we had French films and German films and a lot of films from the UK. And also growing up in Australia, out television was all British television or American television and a little bit of Australian television.
So just always had that feeling that the world was bigger than where I lived, Whereas when I moved to America it felt like America is the center of the world and everything else is feign and far away.
You don't hear that much about it.
You definitely shed some light on some films that I was not familiar with at all. Of course, we all have our own lists of shame as far as things that we should have seen, but we have it. But then there are movies that you covered that I really haven't heard of before. So how did you even come up with your list for this?
Yeah?
I started with some of the obvious ones that I wanted to include, and I also made rules for myself being trying to cover movies from as many countries as possible, although I ended up with a lot of French films because France has really created some amazing movies in film history. But I also wanted to just choose one film per filmmaker, so you could easily do a seasonal book about Eric
Rohmer's films. Ingrid Bergman has made many films that fit into seasons, so that was tricky in thinking about how to pick just one film from directors such as them. And then I wanted to push my own boundaries because, as you say, we all have blind spots. We all have favorite films that we returned to time and time again, and our film can get smaller and smaller when we're just talking about the same films. So I asked a lot of different people, especially the programmer of TCM Imports
he runs. She has a really good sense of cinema from all over the world, and she helped me with particularly South Asian films that I might have a blind spot too, And I asked some of my just weird cinophile friend but if they had suggestions, especially when it came to Christmas movies, like what are some other Christmas movies that I'm not thinking of? And one that I'd never seen before that is actually hard to find, so I feel a little bad including it is Paris pick Up.
It's a great French film noir set around Christmas time. And that was a film I'd never heard of before, and I watched it, really enjoyed it, and I was happy I could include it. So hopefully there is something for everyone to use that tired expression. Whether you've seen any foreign films, you've seen a lot of foreign films, there will be one or two titles that you've never seen, or maybe you've been meaning to see you haven't yet.
Besides Paris pick Up, what were some of those other treasures that you uncovered along the way?
Yeah, Spring in a Small Town was another film.
It's a Chinese film that I had never heard of before, and it was one of those movies that was lost for many years, and I found it literally by looking up some Spring movies and I was looking for anything with Spring in the title, and I found copy of
that film on YouTube. But I watched it, and it's actually a very poetic movie about this woman who's in an unhappy marriage and then her ex lover comes to stay with her and her husband, and she's deciding whether to run off with him or stay in her marriage. And that's what I love about film, and particularly foreign film and world cinema, is that there's so much to
discover and there's so many surprises to be found. The film that I hadn't heard of now becomes one of my favorite movies and one that I'm glad I get to share with people.
And it's always the trick, isn't that trying to spread the wealth and say, like, there's this thing over here that you really need to pay attention too, and you kind of have to lead people to it. So I love with your entries with each one of these films
that you give us some history. We talked about the filmmakers as much as you can and just even having those little what would you call those sidebars on most of those little piles where it says, like other good things by this director or other things that fit into this particular area. I love that. I think it was really smart the way you did that.
Thank you.
Yeah, it's hard to include all the films that you want to include, and of course doing any kind of list book when it comes to film is very contentious and dangerous because everyone will have ideas of what should be included, what shouldn't be included. Is so I wanted to find as many ways as I could to add
more titles in there. So sometimes I've got more titles by that same director, sometimes more from that country, or sometimes more of that on that same theme, and then I hope that people can continue to go deeper and find.
Some other films to watch.
It was also really fun to get to talk about not only, as you said, the filmmaker and the making of the film and the film itself, but what was
happening in the country at that time. People say keep politics out of films, but I think that's impossible because every movie is an all time capsule of when it was made and where it was made, and particularly when it comes to a lot of the cinematic movements like the French New Wave, Italian Near Realism, the Czech New Wave, they all came from a political place of people wanting to stand up and speak the truth to power, and that fuels a lot of I got to learn a
lot about world history and politics as well as the films and the filmmakers.
To the man, how long did it take you to write this?
I only had a couple of months.
As you may know, when you write a book, you hear when the book is going to come out, and you think, okay, April twenty twenty five, I have a long time. I have a year to write this book, and then it gets shorter and shorter because printing deadlines and editing deadlines design deadlines. So I wrote it probably in about four months, and of course I wish I had a lot longer, but there's something nice about having a.
Deadline because you'll always get it done. And it forced me to make some decisions, and.
You're doing your regular job at the same time.
Yes, So I figured out that last year I probably wrote around three hundred thousand.
Words about film Wow.
Because I write my own scripts for TCM, so I write about four hundred intros and four hundred outros a year for TCM, and each one is different. You may reuse a couple of the same stories if there's not too much material in existence about the making of that film, but I try to write each film fresh. So that was a real challenge, and I felt like I was
going cross sits some days writing about movies. But I also got to draw on a lot of research that I'd already done for some of the films that had played on TCM imports, so I'd already written about them. I already had materials that I could start when so that definitely helped with some of the tight time frames that I had and some of the films I've also
written about in my previous books. I always liked to include movies made by female directors, especially some of my favorites, like My Brilliant Career from Australia or Jehan Dumont from Belgium, which is named the greatest film of all time on the BBC site and Sound Poll quite recently. So some of them I had already written about, and the challenge was not to copy myself, but try to write about them in a fresh way.
I just like that each entry feels so different from every other one, Like sometimes you'll start with the filmmaker, sometimes you'll start with the history. And just the way that you lead us through these stories. Each entry in the book feels like a different story and a different approach to it. And yeah, to read like you're talking about my brilliant career and just like, Okay, how's she
going to approach this one? Or I really liked her Entreon angel I might table and the way that you took us through like the career of the filmmaker, and just how this started off as the three different stories or three parts of it and then came together as one instead of a mini series. I love that mixing of the history with the actual telling of the tale.
And you're so right about the politics behind so many things, and just the politics behind how few women directors have been over the years, and I love that you put that thought light on them.
Yeah, thank you.
That's always the challenge when it comes to a list book is how to not make every entry feel the same as the one that came before it, and particularly when there are these trends that happened in world cinema, such as with female directors that you don't see that many female directors prior to the nineteen sixties. And then with the all the various new waves that happened around the world that sort of opened the gates for new voices,
particularly women, to come shining through. And then of course the men in those new waves usually the ones that end up with the spotlight. So that's to be able to say women were there, they had more obstacles to overcome, but they were making films at the same time. But again to try not to feel too repetitive, so I'm glad I didn't do that. And I also like doing that when it comes to the TCM intros because I do so many scripts. How do I get into each film in a slightly different way?
What's the angle?
Honestly, the fun part of my job is doing the research about all of these movies and you come across one little nugget in a book and you're like, that's it. That's the book, and that's what I'm going to base the whole story around, and to try to tell a cohesive story with a beginning, middle, and end, and not academic.
I'm not a film scholar.
I didn't study films, so I don't naturally have that way of writing or speaking anyway. But I definitely wanted this book to feel more accessible because foreign films can be very daunting to people not knowing where to start and feeling like they have to have a film degree to be able to follow them.
You may not come at it from an academic point of view, but I disagree with that as far as the way that you will paint that picture, as far as what the world was like at that particular time. That's such an academic thing to do to really give you more of that context, and I think that was super valuable where you could, because, like you said, some of these films are very tough to find out information.
Paris Pickup, which we spoke about before, has very little information. So how to write about that film in a way that just doesn't feel like you're drawing it out? And some entries a little bit longer than others, but I always tried to ground it in context where possible. Don't think context is key to understanding where the film came from. It just didn't come out of nowhere. It came from a movement or a history or a political movement at the time. And I learned so much by writing this book.
And again the great thing about film, always more to see, always more to learn, there's never an end.
You talked about the preponngerance of and I didn't feel that it was too much, and I feel like you balance it out with many other cinemas around the world that it doesn't feel like, Oh, this is a real Francophile that wrote this. I was really happy to see you write about DDLJ, just to see a really brilliant, super popular but yet not that well known to Western white people like me. I love that you were able to go to that place because that's such a fantastic movie.
Yeah, it is a fantastic movie. And I have to credit him, Ronnie Viaz from t them Imports, for leading me to that one. I knew I wanted to include a Bollywood film, but where do you start when it comes to Bollywood. The Hindi language section of Indian cinema is twice as big as Hollywood in terms of the output every single year. It's way more profitable. It's very popular. There's so many films to choose from, and she said you should try DDLJ because it is one of the
most popular Bollywood romantic musicals of all time. And I write about it in the book that there's this one movie theater in India that's Save for the Pandemic has played the film almost every day since it came out thirty years ago, and it still draws an audience every single day. People go and watch it over and over again.
It's a real comfort film for them, and it's a film that explores interesting themes when it comes to arranged marriages versus love marriages, female autonomy in Indian society, the westernization of the younger generation. These two characters, the boy and the girl, live in London, so they have more of a western view and their parents are much more traditional. So you've got that tension between the old ways and the new ways. And then just a lot of dancing, a lot of color, a lot of songs, a lot
of comedy, and it's fun to watch. So hopefully that'll make people curious to explore more Bollywood films.
I know I need to see way more than I have.
Yeah, having a tour guide through the world cinema, and that's what I feel that your book is doing. Quite a bit is taking me by the hand and take me around all of these different countries to show me here's what you're missing.
Yeah.
I know you are such a cinephile and you're very experimental in what you watched. But some people that don't know where to start when it comes to films that aren't American, or maybe feel daunted by the fact that there's subtitles, or they think it'll be boring or hard to relate to. But actually you discover that there are so many similarities between American films and films from around the world, and the characters are human and we can
all relate to that. Plus, I think right now it just feels fun to be able to travel around the world virtually and to escape America absorb ourselves in many different other cultures from around the world.
Some escapism, then virtual travel yet.
And then yeah, the whole seasonal thing. Like I said, I think that was brilliant, And that's something I talk about on the show a lot. As far as if you're releasing the movie that that in the wintertime and at Christmas or around Christmas, may be released it around that time of the year. Like the idea of releasing the thing dead center in the summer didn't make any sense to me at all.
Why don't you do that exactly?
I know. I love watching winter films in winter and summer films in summer. Be in to fall, especially now I live in New England, the leaves are turning and I just want to curl up on the couch with a blanket and a cup of hot apple cider and watch a film that's set around that time. And like I said, some movies are very obviously set during that time, like Purple Noon, for example, the French adaptation of the talent in Mister Ripley is very obviously set. It's summer,
and it feels like summer. It's bright, it's colorful, it's sweaty. And then you have films that I just like more of a mood of the season. D DLJ takes place many different seasons, but I felt like that was a spring movie because it's New Loves.
New Journeys and rebirth.
And then I have films like All About My Mother at Mother's Day and so each films if you wanted to, you could watch one film a week for an entire American calendar year and it should match up to whatever holiday is happening. If people wonder why there's a lot of film noir in fall, that's because of Noir November, which has become a big movement among cinophiles to watch film noir in November. So it's fun again to play around with things like that and just force me to
stretch my own list and knowledge. And I'm glad you said it doesn't feel too French because it's funny even films like I was like, oh okay, the Double Life of Varani, that feels like a full film and it's Polish. Oh wait, it's set in France and mostly in French. Or Black Girl from Santagal. I love showing that film. That's a wonderful film and that it's summer. But oh chie in France and Singalese French, So I couldn't escape the French as much as that, right, And.
It's good to know so that there's another Christmas Noir film as well. I'm always into those. I'm a big Blast of Silence fan, so having another Noir to watch around Christmas time is going to be a good thing.
Yeah.
And Eddie Muller, who hosts the Noir Eli on TCM was very happy that I included Paris Peak up plus all the other film noirs that I included in Saul, and it was fun to include Black Christmas, which is a Canadian slash of film, and who doesn't love watching people get murdered around Christmas?
Its festive.
I am so curious as far as some of the other stuff that you weren't familiar with, because again I'm talking to the Queen of TCMM for it there. So what were some of the other ones that were surprised for you?
I think just making sure that I wasn't doing the obvious choices. So I'd seen films like La Dulce Vita before, but when it comes to Federico Fellini, mostly I've watched Eight and a Half, and that was a film that I'm very determined not to include because so many brilliant film scholars have written about Eight and a Half. I didn't think I could add much to that discourse. Films like Fanny and Alexander by Ingma Bergman another Christmas film.
I've definitely watched Persona and other Bergman films much more than that film.
But I think d.
DLJ spring in a small town and a Paris pick up with a three I had never seen before.
Others I'd seen once or twice again.
When it comes to filmmakers like Sachichi Rive from India, he has a massive filmography and you most often talk about his Apu trilogy with Patapanchali, especially his first masterpiece. But I was like, Okay, let me choose something else. So I'd seen dev once through TCM imports.
And I really liked it.
So I revisited that film again and realized, Okay, there's a lot of meat meati stuff I can talk about here again, making sure there was a range of subject matters to talk about.
You mentioned that you're up in main now and I'm curious, do you like fly down to Atlanta once a month to do all of your host segiments.
Yeah, fly down to Atlanta once every two months and film two months worth of introduction in two days. So that's about seventy intros and seventy outros in two days. It's a lot of costume changes, makeup changes, so it looks like it's different days. And let me tell you, it's very hard to have an off day because it lasts on the channel for two months. So if you always want to make sure you have enough sleep and you're ready to go. And it involves just me talking
for probably eight or nine hours straight. And I like the challenge of trying to make sure that each introduction feels fresh, even if it's by fifth time having to say the script because I've kept screwing up without a word or pronunciation. Often my Australian accent gets confusing and a way to pronounce things, So try to make sure it still sounds fresh, it still sounds energetic. Put my mind into watching them, especially when it comes to the outro.
I like to really think about, Okay, how does this film end? Because of a film, it ends with a death, I don't want to come back and be like, hey, what the bag?
So I want to make sure I have the right mood in my mind.
And then I come back to my house in Maine and I spend two months watching all the films, doing all the research and writing the scripts ready for the next one.
I can't even imagine just trying to keep your energy up for recording eight hours a day of those intross a.
Lot of coffee involved. But it's such a lovely crew that we have. TCM and I don't think people realize how much work goes into every single introduction, and they're only played on the channel once and then they're gone.
We never repeat them.
So many people are involved, from programming to the assignment of the scripts, and we have other writers that write for the other host that goes through fact checking. Then we do it with the crew, and it's a huge, massive crew that are looking out for everything. There's not a hair out of place on my head. There is
will stop and do it again. Everyone is so dedicated to make every single introduction perfect and I love that because I think it would be so easy to say, good enough, that's fine, it's going to play once, don't worry about it. But no, every person, including the host, want to make sure that every intro we deliver is not only factually correct but also entertaining, but also as perfect as it can be.
Now, obviously I don't work at TCM still think that you need a host for the occult cinema stuff that you were doing, But just throwing my hand out there. Anyway, when it comes to TCM from the outside, from my perspective, it does look incredibly professional and so well done, and the same thing goes for the book as well. A layout is gorgeous. I love those big, colorful photos that you have throughout the book, or the beautiful black and
white stuff. It's so nice to look at as well as just to read your words.
Now, I was so excited to get to do a book with Running Pressed. They take care of all of the TTHM Library books and do such an amazing job. My three previous books were with a lovely publisher, but very small and we weren't able to include any photographs.
It was a very.
Small team when it came to editing and copy editing. Here, I felt like I was really supported. There's a whole team involved, again, very professional. They have designers who do the layout. Then I picked all the photos, which was sometimes challenging because some of these films don't have many photos available, so I wanted to include as many as I could, and we went back and forth on the design. We went back and forth on every single detail, lots
of help with copy editing, with fact checking. It was a big, long process. But when you see the book and hold the book, I love that at eight it feels like a book, like it puts some weight to it.
It feels like a proper book, and it'll.
Be nice to have on your coffee table look at to read and then if you're stuck for what to watch. Because I'm just like everyone else where I sit down at night, I open up all the streaming apps and I go, I don't know, there's so much what where do I start. I feel like I get analysis paralysis. I'm like, I don't know, do I just watch the same movie as I've always watched. I also hate when the algorithm stares to tell you to watch more of the same you've just seen, Like, no, let's widen it
a little bit. So hopefully people can just open up the book and find something new, and whether they love the film or hate it, they'll have an experience and that's good.
It's the kind of book that makes me wish I had a coffee table because I'll tell you reading it that night in danger of it landing on my face. But yeah, it's nick how many interviews are in there? Fifty two fifty two? Yeah, so yeah, the whole weekly thing. And I love that idea of having a new movie to watch every single week.
Yeah.
I was trying to think of how many films that I could write about within the timeframe, and that would feel worthwhile.
To have in a book.
And fifty seems like a good number, and you often see that when it comes to list books or about film, and so I thought, maybe if I do one every week, then it's fifty two. When I first started to think about the films I wanted to include before I came up with a seasonal idea, I listed probably around two hundred and sixty something movies that I would love to write about, and I thought, Okay, I think just shorten
this down. I do not have time to write about this, but hey, maybe there could be future versions to come.
Yeah.
Do you have your next project already picked out?
No?
But you know what, I've only ever written non fiction and nonfiction about film. But I'm really curious to try fiction. I don't know if i'd be any good at it. I'd love a cozy murder mystery. Whether I could pull that off, I'm not sure, but that's I think what I'm gonna play around with next and see what happens.
Alicia, I don't know you as well as I would like, but just from the small interactions we've had together, I think you'll do whatever you put your mind.
To thank you. I am very temined, so it works in my favorite I.
Definitely recommend that people check this book out because it is so much fun and so well written, and I really appreciate you doing it for us.
Thank you, Mike.
I appreciate you reading the book, and I'm so glad that you liked it.
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