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DGA QUARTERLY 75 boy she will marry. It's literally 'That time is over,' and 'a new one's begun.' Whether Bogdanovich planned these things out in advance•as I suspect he did•or discovered them on the editing table doesn't matter. Every character-nuance, every camera move, every cut is leading you somewhere." The bleak austerity of the picture's sound design is often honed to a single effect of one kind or another• intensely blowing wind, the creak of bedsprings, sourced music (usually Hank Williams in this case; Bogdanovich uses no other score), even complete si- lence. "He does this to help us feel what those char- acters feel, that sense we have in life of one sense- impression taking over." Since much of Nocturnal Animals is set in the empty spaces of west Texas, Ford told his own sound designer, "Go back and listen to the wind in Last Picture Show." Yet such intensities are useless, he stresses, unless character-driven. "Notice that nobody is making eye contact," he says of the interactions at the local pool hall, "until this mo- ment," when the establishment's owner, Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson) faces a local romantic rogue, Abilene (Clu Gulager). "I love the way these men look at each other. We find out later that they've both been in- volved with the same woman"•Lois, played by Ellen Burstyn•"and Sam truly loved her• but watch!" They eye each other so closely•even menacingly•that as Sam hands over the halves of a pool cue, Abilene delib- erately fits and screws them together with a sexually suggestive intensity. "This one is currently screwing the love of that one's life, and so what's he doing with his fingertips?" A studious film journalist throughout the 1960s, Bogdanovich never explicitly reveals his debt to his masters, yet their influence is lightly felt. There are two playful steals from Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, "The film I nearly chose to screen for this article," says Ford, "because it's exactly the kind of comedy I would love someday to make•dark and twisted." The first comes when Jacy sexily dangles a French fry over Duane's mouth, the second when she and her mother Lois en- P I C T U R E P E R F E C T : (Far left), the first image we see of Billy (Sam Bottoms) is framed by broken glass. (Above), Jacy (Cybill Shepherd) looks straight into the camera as she is introduced. (Below), The local cad Abilene (Clu Gulager) confronts Sam the Lion (Ben Johnson).