As a resident of New Jersey, New York City has always been within easy distance of me. There was a time two years ago when I would visit the city weekly. Now that I live in Old York, three thousand miles away, I realize how lucky I was to be so close to such an amazing city. As of now my only connection to the city is through the films I watch, and it is amazing what different directors make out of the city. I’m not talking about Marvel Superhero films that blow up the city in every film or hacks like Oliver Stone who film it in an outright pedestrian manner; instead, I’d like to highlight three directors and the diverse ways they shoot the city.
As expressed in my last full-length entry, I am a huge fan of Woody Allen. And seriously, when discussing the way directors use New York City in film there’s no better place to start than him. He has continuously lived in New York City his entire life, and with the exception of Love and Death and Sleeper all of his finest films are New York films. He so loves New York that, even though he’s won and been nominated for a boat load of Oscars, the only time he ever went to the ceremony was in 2002 after the World Trade Center attacks to ask directors to continue making films in his city. Filming in the city for almost forty years, Allen’s films show the crime-ridden city of the 70’s and 80’s and the rich safe modern city in his later films, both with the same sort of love and veneration. When Woody Allen’s Manhattan was released in 1979, Manhattan was the most dangerous city in America, suffered from historic black outs, and was believed to be going irreversibly downhill. The film was intended as a valentine to the city, showing it as a city for the misunderstood intellectual, something Allen has pegged himself as his whole life. Ironically, as New York has modernized and become once again the American center for culture, Woody Allen has been forced to film in Europe, as he can no longer afford to film in the city.
While Woody Allen was romanticizing the dark New York of the 1970’s, Martin Scorsese was using its ugliness as a muse for his films. Besides his unfortunate musical New York, New York, Scorsese’s films depict a New York of thugs, loan sharks, porno theatres, broken homes, loaners, and prostitution. Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull all star Robert De Niro as a New Yorker who struggles against inner demons that the city personifies. Scorsese continued this trend throughout the next decade with films such as The King of Comedy, After Hours, and Goodfellas. Even as New York became a safer and cleaner city, Scorsese has kept portraying the grittiness of it despite the fact that its now a very different city by going back into history with Gangs of New York. Between Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen films, it’s hard to believe they are making films about the same city, a tribute to both the filmmakers and the versatility of the city.
And finally, Spike Lee remains as prolific a New York auteur as Scorsese and Allen. Like both of them, Lee has lived his entire life from early childhood on in the city, and has made it a secondary character in all of his films. His New York, like Scorsese’s, is a gritty place, but not due to thugs and gangsters, but rather due to poverty and prejudice. His first major film, Do the Right Thing remains not only one of the best New York films, but also one of the overall best films ever made. It is set on a fictional block in Brooklyn, and simply goes through the day of a white pizza business in a black community on its last day of existence. In his 2002 film 25th Hour, Edward Norton’s character Monty lays out an anti New York manifesto, known as the Fuck You monologue.
“Fuck me? Fuck you! Fuck you and this whole city and everyone in it.
Fuck the panhandlers, grubbing for money, and smiling at me behind my back.
Fuck squeegee men dirtying up the clean windshield of my car. Get a fucking job!
Fuck the Sikhs and the Pakistanis bombing down the avenues in decrepit cabs, curry steaming out their pores and stinking up my day. Terrorists in fucking training. Slow the fuck down! Fuck the Chelsea boys with their waxed chests and pumped up biceps. Going down on each other in my parks and on my piers, jingling their dicks on my Channel 35.
Fuck the Korean grocers with their pyramids of overpriced fruit and their tulips and roses wrapped in plastic. Ten years in the country, still no speaky English?”
The entire monologue is longer than this article, it continues on to belittle every group of New Yorkers, before he finally looks in the mirror and says “No, fuck you Monty.” He leaves the bathroom and goes back out to the nightclub in an attempt to enjoy his last night as a free man. 
New York is an immense city, different authors, poets, musicians, photographers, artists, and even every day people see it in very different ways, which is why I get bored with tedious sterile views of the city. Directors that feel compelled to get close ups of the bridges or the Statue of Liberty, as if they need to scream THIS MOVIE IS FILMED IN NEW YORK! bore me. Many people complained when Stanley Kubrick made a film set in New York and filmed it in London, but I think that was a great move on his part, as the whole film is supposed to be a dream story, and setting it in New York would have been too authentic for a dream. As for films about the “real” New York, I love the interpretations of real New Yorkers who can be extremely diverse, such as Woody Allen’s land of the neurotic Jewish philosopher, Martin Scorsese’s gritty catholic thugs, or Spike Lee’s controversial racial clashes.
When I was a kid I used to watch Home Movies on Adult Swim, a show about kids who try to make movies with a hand held camera. I remember the main character, who was the director, saying at one point that he was going to switch roles with his friend and become the actor, because every director wants to act, and every actor wants to direct. Hollywood keeps proving this statement true. Spike Lee regularly appears in his own movies, Tarantino has done it, Kevin Smith wrote Silent Bob for himself, David Lynch acted in Twin Peaks, Martin Scorsese, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Fritz Lang, the list goes on of directors who have appeared in their own films. Then there are those who have had full time jobs as both actors and directors, most notably Orson Welles and Clint Eastwood. Both of them can be studied in either context, and often appear in their own work. But what I’m getting to are the actors, who make it big in Hollywood, and then try their hand at directing. These films are what interest
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