It seemed like very good timing that the Chesapeake Film Festival decided to celebrate the life work of one of the cinema’s great directors of American culture during this critical election year. Filmmaker John Avildsen, who began his career with the independent film Joe in 1970, followed with films like Save the Tiger, Rocky, Karate Kid, and Lean on Me, was acknowledged this weekend for those remarkable achievements.
The Spy was lucky enough to have a short chat with Avildsen at the Bullitt House on Saturday afternoon to talks about those films, his approach to film directing, and a few political observations about some of the famous characters the emerged from those productions, including the ranting factory worker Joe Curran in Joe, and boxer Rocky Balboa in Rocky and Rocky V. Spoiler alert; Bill is pretty sure that Joe would undoubtedly be siding with Donald Trump and that Rocky would be in the Hillary column.
But Avildsen starts our chat will an appreciation of his father’s metal fabrication business, where he was able to see that the act of creating a film is no different from the process of producing a steel rod. In both cases, it is a series of organized processes that must be done to create a well-crafted product.
This video is approximately two minutes in length. For more information about the Chesapeake Film Festival, which concludes today, please go here
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