Bill Kte’pi’s Official Web Site

Going through movies and adjusting my Netflix queue, I realized — in that way that you internally articulate something you already knew and was obvious, but hadn’t been highlighted — that movies are as much an influence on my writing as music and other stories are, but I take something different from them. Not the plot, usually, though I’ve written a novel that owes a lot to Cool Hand Luke and Rio Bravo. What I take from movies is a tone … almost a color, or a sense of place … a place from which I can imagine writing the story.

They’re not always movies I love, though they often are. And they’re very often movies that don’t have anything to do with what I’m writing. The movies that play the most into what I write?

Carnal Knowledge (if more people watched this movie, Closer wouldn’t be so overrated)

They All Laughed (generally heralded as a disaster, but I love it for some reason)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Wicker Park

Cool Hand Luke

Badlands

Two-Lane Blacktop

Duel