Director Peter Bogdanovich on working with Cher on "Mask": “She Can’t Act; She won Best Actress at Cannes Because I Shot Her Very Well. "

Peter Bogdanovich’s peak streak of films in the 70s happened with 1971’s “The Last Picture Show,” 1972’s “What’s Up Doc,” and 1973’s “Paper Moon.” Three top-notch masterworks, or close to it. Ever since then? Nothing worth shouting about, some out and out disasters and a single semi-victory leap with 1985’s “Mask,” starring Cher.

Cinephiles have been talking about the candid, very blunt talk Bogdanovich just had with Vulture’s Andrew Goldman‘s [Interview]. Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells said “It’s the kind of interview that almost never happens — the kind in which the interview subject says exactly what he thinks. Exactly as “fuck it, I don’t care.” That’s about the gist of it. The whole thing is around a 15 minute read and goes through the money Bogdanovich made in Hollywood, the 7000 sq ft, $15M Bel Air House he owned, his days at the Playboy mansion, the massive ego, the turning down of great movies, the women etc.

Most notable are his total dismissals of Billy Wilder and Hugh Hefner, both surely rolling over in their graves over his punative words about them.

However, when Goldman asks the director whom the most difficult actor he ever worked with was, Bogdanovich doesn’t even hesitate and replies that it was Cher. “Well, she didn’t trust anybody, particularly men,” he said. “She doesn’t like men. That’s why she’s named Cher: She dropped her father’s name. Sarkisian, it is.”

“She can’t act,” Bogdanovich added. “She won Best Actress at Cannes because I shot her very well. And she can’t sustain a scene. She couldn’t do what Tatum [O’Neal] did in Paper Moon. She’d start off in the right direction, but she’d go off wrong somehow, very quickly. So I shot a lot of close-ups of her because she’s very good in close-ups. Her eyes have the sadness of the world. You get to know her, you find out it’s self-pity, but still, it translates well in movies. I shot more close-ups of her than I think in any picture I ever made.” Yikes.

Bogdanovich is now 79 years of age, lives “in a modest ground-floor Toluca Lake apartment he shares with his ex-wife Louise Stratten and her mother, Nelly Hookstratten,” Goldman adds that. “Bogdanovich is noticeably frail as he recovers from a fall he suffered while at a French film festival, where he collected a lifetime-­achievement award; he shattered his left femur.”

The mighty eventually fall and Bogdanovich was known as the mighty whiz-kid of Hollywood, during that aforementioned streak of films, in the 1970s. He hasn’t really delved in fiction filmmaking since 2001’s half-decent “A Cat’s Meow,” unless you count the misbegotten “She’s Funny That Way,” which was produced by Wes Anderson and Noah Baumbach and went straight to video.