How Tarkovsky Taught Me to Write About the West

In 1983, Telluride Film Festival co-founder Tom Luddy took Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky on a road trip. Tarkovsky’s film Nostalghia was going to screen at the event. They drove from Luddy’s home in Berkeley to Telluride by way of Monument Valley, the expanse of desert belonging to the Navajo Nation and famous for grand sandstone buttes that stand alone like statues on its floor. The site was used over and over again by Hollywood to evoke the distinct atmosphere of the American West: director John Ford used the valley as the location for ten Westerns; John Wayne played the hero there six times.