Wearing a Filipino-print shirt he purchased at his favorite craft shop in Los Angeles, and socks covered with cows sporting sunglasses, Gilliam showed up the night after his award ceremony to the Palais des Congrès to teach a Master Class to an audience full of Moroccan film students. When asked why he films, Gilliam responded with a long pause and then said into the microphone, “I suppose it’s the best job out there.” For Gilliam, film is the one medium that combines every art form he loves. I caught up with Gilliam for a short chat before his master class. Here, in his words from both our talk and the class, are the combined lessons, or anti-lessons, he has to offer from his long and rich career in the world’s greatest profession.
via Ten Lessons on Filmmaking From Terry Gilliam | Filmmaker Magazine.
A one-of-a-kind marketplace from Steven Soderbergh. – Extension 765
Raiders
SEP 22, 2014
(Note: This posting is for educational purposes only.)
I’m assuming the phrase “staging” came out of the theatre world, but it’s equally at home (and useful) in the movie world, since the term (roughly defined) refers to how all the various elements of a given scene or piece are aligned, arranged, and coordinated. In movies the role of editing adds something unique: the opportunity to extend and/or expand a visual (or narrative) idea to the limits of one’s imagination—a crazy idea that works today is tomorrow’s normal.
I value the ability to stage something well because when it’s done well its pleasures are huge, and most people don’t do it well, which indicates it must not be easy to master (it’s frightening how many opportunities there are to do something wrong in a sequence or a group of scenes. Minefields EVERYWHERE. Fincher said it: there’s potentially a hundred different ways to shoot something but at the end of the day there’s really only two, and one of them is wrong). Of course understanding story, character, and performance are crucial to directing well, but I operate under the theory a movie should work with the sound off, and under that theory, staging becomes paramount (the adjective, not the studio. although their logo DOES appear on the front of this…).
So I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging, how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me. Oh, and I’ve removed all sound and color from the film, apart from a score designed to aid you in your quest to just study the visual staging aspect. Wait, WHAT? HOW COULD YOU DO THIS? Well, I’m not saying I’m like, ALLOWED to do this, I’m just saying this is what I do when I try to learn about staging, and this filmmaker forgot more about staging by the time he made his first feature than I know to this day (for example, no matter how fast the cuts come, you always know exactly where you are—that’s high level visual math shit).
At some point you will say to yourself or someone THIS LOOKS AMAZING IN BLACK AND WHITE and it’s because Douglas Slocombe shot THE LAVENDAR HILL MOB and the THE SERVANT and his stark, high-contrast lighting style was eye-popping regardless of medium.
via A one-of-a-kind marketplace from Steven Soderbergh. – Extension 765.
rePost::Michel Gondry Interview | The Talks
Director of one of my all time faves : Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
How do you get your head free from work when you’re finished?
Just hanging out with my son is incredible, so when I have some time off I try to catch up on my duties as a father. He lives with me and I love spending my time with him. Once a week or so we go to see a movie together. When I do things with my son I realize that I am actually not working.
Nevertheless you go and see movies with him. Can you step back from being a director and simply enjoy a movie?
Yes I can enjoy it. But it’s true it is a very complex problem. It is different because my son has a less critical approach to movies than me. He enjoys going to see a movie as part of the audience. Sometimes I know I won’t like the movie we are going to see, but he gets upset with me and tells me to just enjoy going to the movies. So sometimes I don’t tell him my opinion, but on the other hand sometimes we have the same taste. It’s funny, when he wants to piss me off he tells me I am a bad director and that Quentin Tarantino is much better than me. I hate it when he says that!
Because of your ego or because you don’t like Tarantino?
He forced me to go see Kill Bill Vol. 2 and I walked out of it, just like every time I go and see a movie by Quentin, besides Pulp Fiction – I finished that one. But all the others are too mean for me. I mean, he is a brilliant director, much more skilled than me. You see great performances, great images. Everything is great, only the message is dangerous. It’s all revenge and vengeance, about being mean and cynical. I would almost say that these movies are not made for my son, but it is exa
via Michel Gondry Interview | The Talks.
Edward Norton Interview | The Talks
Do you ever get concerned when your films don’t get as widely distributed as you’d like?
No, no. I have always made films out of the same impulses. In the past couple years I have made a few more that were in a more independent model. But, for example, The Illusionist never got any distribution and it did really, really well. If you let that be your yardstick you can get wound very, very tight. I have had enough experiences.
What do you mean?
You go through the experience of the initial release and the way people assess that, but then so many films these days form their own relationship with people over time and you begin to have a bit more faith in the longevity. In a way it’s a relief to find out that films will find their own measure.
That’s all well and good until the film can’t get made in the first place.
True, I don’t even know if Fight Club would be made now. But there is always something coming out that defies that gloomy prognosis and you realize that they do get made.
via Edward Norton Interview | The Talks.
To Watch::Critic After Dark: Enough Said (Nicole Holofcener, 2013)
Plenty uttered
Never mind that it’s a comedy for adults, never mind that it’s understated yet grounded in everyday upper middle class life (sure it’s upper middle class–many of the houses onscreen could sell for over three hundred thousand, some considerably more, though James Gandolfini’s Albert still wears a shabby gray shirt and eats heavily buttered popcorn out of a bucket, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Eva still ogles the inside of some of her richer clients’ houses), never mind that director Nicole Holofcener seems less interested in the plot twist (Eva dates Albert, realizes one of her clients (Marianne, played with astringent insouciance by Catherine Keener) is Albert’s ex-wife) than in the softpedal interaction between the two middle-aged lovers–if you must take away one thing from the film it’s this: Gandolfini manages to make chubby sexy again.
via Critic After Dark: Enough Said (Nicole Holofcener, 2013).
Kenshin's Third Movie Has Action Scenes that Will Leave You Awestruck
If you like Kenshin, see this movie. If you like anime, see this movie. If you’re curious about how to successfully adapt a work of fiction to film, see this movie. If you like sword-fighting action, see this movie. If you have a pulse, see this movie.
I guess what I am trying to say is this: See this movie.
Rurouni Kenshin: The Legend Ends was released in Japanese theaters on September 13, 2014. It will hit theaters in the Philippines on September 24, 2014. No other specific international release dates have been announced.
via Kenshin’s Third Movie Has Action Scenes that Will Leave You Awestruck.
The Blackmagic Production Camera and Pocket Camera: A Review | Filmmaker Magazine
If I had a bucket list it would include making movies people love. File this one on stuff I’d eventually use for this I’d love to do someday!
Why do I prefer Blackmagic cameras? Really simple: I like the picture quality.
I reviewed the Cinema Camera for Filmmaker last fall, so now I’m going to focus on the Production Camera — which I tested for two weeks in July — and, to a lesser extent, the Pocket Camera, which I’ve owned since January.
via The Blackmagic Production Camera and Pocket Camera: A Review | Filmmaker Magazine.
rePost::Critic After Dark: Un condamné à mort (A Man Escaped, Robert Bresson 1956)
Have to check this out one of these days
Escape Plan
(Plot discussed in close detail)
Who’d have thought Bresson, he of the austere aestheticism and rigorous philosophy, could make such an effective thriller as A Man Escaped? That opening sequence of Lt. Fontaine about to attempt a break from a car is as superbly timed and edited–with the suspense stretched out into a thin, taut wire–as anything from Kurosawa or Eisenstein.
Bresson’s visual style couldn’t be more fitting for the setting–the whole movie is focused on the title character, in a series of tight medium shots and close-ups. The camera is trained on him, and since he operates in such a small space, it rarely strays elsewhere. The impression of claustrophobic confinement is thus emphasized, even magnified–about an hour of the way through you dearly wish for a shot of a tree, of the sky, of something outside the prison walls, which Bresson refuses to grant (the final shots are of more walls, glimpsed through thick fog, and at night). A voiceover keeps you constantly inside Fontaine’s head, telling you what he thinks and feels with direct simplicity.
via Critic After Dark: Un condamné à mort (A Man Escaped, Robert Bresson 1956).
Why the Best American Filmmakers Owe a Debt to Satyajit | Indiewire
An Underappreciated Master
Ray began his career by writing a lot of essays for the Calcutta Film Society journals, where he wrote, influenced by the essays of Rudolf Ernheim (the most famous theoretician at Hollywood during the late silent era) and “The River” by Jean Renoir, which also had an immense impact on his stylistic vision as a filmmaker.
There is an austerity that exists in Ray’s films.
However, for a director that was described as “undoubtedly a giant in the film world” by Henri Cartier Bresson and one of “the four greats” by Martin Scorsese (the other greats include Akira Kurosawa, Ingrid Bergman and Federico Fellini), Ray is still a relatively unknown director. Ironically, Kurosawa once wrote to Ray’s biographer, Andrew Robinson, declaring that “not to have seen [Ray’s] films is like living without seeing the sun or the moon.”
via Why the Best American Filmmakers Owe a Debt to Satyajit | Indiewire.
Film Review: On The Job OTJ
I’ve always been ranting about how a lot of good films can be made with a shoestring budget and what we have is a failure of imagination and craftsmanship not of budget and resources.
This film although still made on a pittance (50 Million Pesos / 1.2 US Dollars)when compared to