The Beginning is the End!

Hitchcock is the classic text-book - to make you understand the grammar of cinema. Kurosawa adds a legendary and epic quality to it and takes it to a higher emotional and spiritual plane.

And then comes Stanley Kubrick - to make you realize the intuitive potential of cinema and explore its abstractions - to motivate you to keep stretching its limits. No doubt, he has influenced all modern maverick masters.

Remember 'Pulp Fiction'? Of course, you do - where the first scene is the last scene. Many films have used this device in the last two decades and it still continues to work. It is actually an established literary device called In medias res ( Latin = into the middle of affairs), a story beginning either at the mid-point or at the conclusion, rather than at the beginning.

We, my brother and I, seem to be so much in love with this tool that all three of our completed screenplays begin with the climax of the respective films!

Watched Stanley Kubrick's 'Lolita' today. He used this tool for wonderful effect, way back in 1962! His earlier film 'The Killing' is most probably the first major film to use parallel narration with several tracks going back and forth in time.

Vikramaditya Motwane says, you can learn all you need to learn about film making from Hitchcock, Kurosawa, and Kubrick. Just last night my brother and I were discussing this. Hitchcock is the classic text-book - to make you understand the grammar of cinema. Kurosawa adds a legendary and epic quality to it and takes it to a higher emotional and spiritual plane. And then comes Stanley Kubrick - to make you realize the intuitive potential of cinema and explore its abstractions - to motivate you to keep stretching its limits.

No doubt, he has influenced all modern maverick masters.