How many producers can match Sue Milliken’s fifty years in the industry? How many can write like she does? Or tread the fine line between honesty and discretion? ‘Selective Memory: A Life in Film’ is both charming and informative, as Melanie Coombs explains.
When people ask me what a producer does, I refer them to a letter Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo. “What is drawing? How does one come to it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. How is one to get through that wall since pounding at it is of no use? In my opinion one has to undermine that wall, filing through it steadily and patiently. And there you are – how can one continue such work assiduously without being distracted or diverted, unless one reflects and orders one’s life according to principles? And as it is with art so it is with other things. And great things are not something accidental, they must be distinctly willed.”
