What does silent film serve better than sound films?
GM: Fairytale. All stories are more or less fairytales, and removing speech makes everything more universal. It makes specific characters stand in for everybody, so actions take on fairytale significance. And the writing has to be pared down to represent people as types, too. Certain types of allegorical horror films are better as silent films, because talking and screaming and all that extraneous stuff just kind of gets in the way. I really like Lon Chaney films, those great human-disfigurement allegories where external injuries stand in for psychological injuries. Because silent films are so aggressively artificial, they’re not trying to fool anyone that they’re representing real life as it really is. They’re bedtime stories, and that’s something wonderful. AVC: None of your films are especially realistic. GM: If you sit in on a film class with students, their big complaint is “That’s not like real life.” They don’t realize that they don’t really want to watch real life. They don’t w
