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76 DGA QUARTERLY She puts on a different dress. She even walks across a room more youthfully." After Jacy scolds Duane, "Quit prissin'" ("That is so Texas," laughs Ford), then tosses her head, hair swinging in the breeze, Bogdanovich cuts to Ruth, tossing her head with just as much girlish aban- don. "They look so much alike in this instant." Sound design deepens their alikeness. The self-con- sciousness of Ruth's first sexual encounter with Sonny is underscored by creaking bedsprings. "Look at Cloris Leachman's face. Here we're just lingering on her, but we see so much feeling, her eyes are never a blank," yet her hopeless tenderness vies for our attention against those loud rusty squeaks. Similarly, when Jacy•tired of Duane's virginal fumblings•seduces her mother's lover on a pool table, the soundtrack goes utterly and thor- oughly silent. "So powerful," says Ford. "Nothing makes you watch like the complete absence of sound. Look how sensuously she fits her fingers through the baskets of that pool table. You could say it's a cliché, but some clichés are just true." At a dreamy close-up of Cybill Shepherd, Ford re- marks: "My God was she beautiful. My God was she fresh. Of course Bogdanovich fell in love with her!" He doesn't see such an emotional connection as an im- pediment to artistry. "You have to always have a crush on your actors. I don't mean sexually. You have to love them, the better the more you work with them." The rugged gentility of Ben Johnson as Sam the Lion could spark such a crush not just in a director but any onlooker. "I see such sensitivity, such kindness in his face," says Ford. Sam has brought Sonny and the dis- abled Billy out to the wide water tanks amid the plains of Mesquite. "First time I come to water the horses at this tank was more than 40 years ago," he reflects, and launches into a magnificent reverie about loving a young beauty he used to swim with. This moment won John- son an Oscar—but Ford points out how Bogdanovich supports him with precise directorial technique: "As he starts to reflect, the camera pushes in. Obvious, yet graceful•it aids in our understanding of the story•but does so without most people realizing it." "I brought a young lady swimmin' out here once, more'n 20 years ago," the old man continues, adding that this was "after my wife had lost her mind and most of my boys was dead. This young lady was pretty wild, and pretty deep." "Here we go," says Ford. "Now there's nobody else in the frame." The camera lingers for a long moment as old Sam himself holds still in the realm of memory. "Oh, she growed up," he concludes. "She was just a girl then, really." And the camera begins to withdraw, returning without a cut to its original setup, framing Sam and the two boys. "So simple," says Ford, "and yet•why wouldn't you do that? Directing is choices, and there's a great one." Those sharply etched details of Sam's seemingly loose discourse• that dead wife, and sons•speak to Ford's own approach, breaking down material for direction. He explores each scene of a novel for ap- ertures through which his own memory and imagination can reach to give the film firsthand life. "Such intimate points of connection are vital in the final stages of a film, where you make this or that choice of ter side by side, wearing nearly identical Lolita sunglasses. "This is a quote from a fashion designer, Coco Chanel," says Ford, "and I hate to link fashion and film, because I'm quite self-con- scious about it." Ford made his first fame, and fortune, in fashion• revolutionizing the Gucci label with his own clothing designs and marketing sense before breaking free in 2004 and creating his own brand. "Chanel said, 'Creativity is the art of concealing your source.' You could take that in a cynical way, meaning that you copy things and try to hide it, or you could take it another way. Take everything in, let it become part of you, and trust that when it comes back out at some point, it will have your imprint. It may have touched you so deeply that you won't even realize you've made use of it until much later." People's ache to connect with each other drives A Single Man and Nocturnal Animals, and forms a galaxy of gravitational fields in Last Picture Show. Bogdanovich maps these in fugitive moments of eye contact. Jacy looks straight into the camera as she is introduced. A kindred directness flares when the saddest and wisest of the town's youngsters, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), embarks on a love affair with Ruth (Cloris Leachman), a local housewife so neglected as to be a kind of spinster by default. Their shared solitudes are emphasized in sensitive juxtapositions. The way Jacy fumbles with her brassiere when she is peer-pressured into stripping at the swim party has its counterpart when Ruth un- dresses for the first time before Sonny. As their affair grows more in- tense, "Ruth becomes younger," observes Ford. "Her hair comes down.