This article is one of several contributed by filmmakers and actors as part of Variety’s 100 Greatest Movies of All Time package.
What I’ve always loved about movies is the way one can take over your mind for two hours in a way no other medium can. I have never been so obsessed with paintings, music, or books as I have been in movies. No film has captured me with such subtlety, brilliance, and sharpness as Vertigo.
That the movie itself is about a person obsessed with his own bizarre obsession makes it all the more impressive. In fact, one of the things I most admire among the filmmakers I’ve worked with, whether it’s Nate Shyamalan, Jordan Peele, or David Gordon Green, is the way they use the tools of cinema to show a character’s desire, even (and especially) when that desire is mysterious to me personally. I’ll never know what it’s like to be, like, desperate to get away from an abusive boyfriend or desperate to be a great drummer. But in “The Invisible Man” and “Whiplash,” with Leigh Whannell and Damien Chazelle exploiting every cinematic tool available to them, I somehow understand that desire. Nor was I obsessed with the icy, distant blonde. But it is this desire, in reverse, that makes “Vertigo” and all the best thrillers so scary: if the audience does not understand the characters’ desires, they will not be intimidated by the dreaded obstacles that block the path to the object of that desire. By the end of “Vertigo” desire upon desire builds up and it seems that almost every character is obsessed with each other and none of them will satisfy their desires. Yet every time I watch Vertigo, my own desire—to be moved, to get lost in another reality for two hours, to be scared—is fulfilled better than any other movie.
Jason Blum is the producer of “Get Out” and “The Purge”.
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