Detour

“I think I’ll start with Detour, which is probably a fairly lesser-known title, done in 1945, and I know they spent only $60,000 on it, and I do bring this movie up a lot when people complain about their budget. I say, “Well, you can do a movie for $60,000.” And it’s fabulous. Very noir, very dark, very sordid. I mean, when you want the car to go in two different directions, you just flip the negative, so there’s an answer to everything.”

“Detour, Edgar G. Ulmer. Look, if I had my way I would just be grabbing every '40s film noir that they had here in the closet, but this, it's 69 minutes long. It is the darkest, bleakest film noir. This, if you want to learn how to do efficiency in storytelling and characterization. Tom Neal, who's perfectly cast because basically his life was paralleling the life of the doomed protagonist in this movie. And then Ann Savage is Vera, maybe one of the scariest film noir femme fatales.”