the reality of moviemaking...

"The problem with auteurism is that it presupposes that one person can impress upon 95 people, so clearly, that the manifestation of whatever it is going on in your head can be clearly attributed to them. The reality of moviemaking is, y’know, it’s a rat fuck. Every day is a skirmish, and you might escape every skirmish, but there are injuries and there losses, and there are things that you had 10 meetings about that go off perfectly, and there are things that you’ve had no meetings about that ended up taking eight of the 12 hours in the day because you didn’t think it was going to be so complicated. 

So the notion that someone calls this perfect, idealised version of the scene… It’s like the jet-propulsion industry, the idea that something is wind-tunnel tested and is gonna go off the way it’s supposed to – it never goes off the way it’s supposed to. My issue with auteurism is, how do you attribute a master plan to a happy accident? There are certain things that you can count on. You have to work at it, and you have to know what it is you’re trying to do and impart that to an army of people who all have their own ideas about what’s important.

Everybody who comes on to a set looks at it from a slightly different standpoint. You can’t say to the third violinist, ‘This is what the totality of the thing should sound like.’ You just need them to get them to do their thing. When you hear it, it either moves you or it doesn’t, so you have to figure if it needs a little bit more of this or that. That’s happening in the rehearsal, it’s happening in the coverage throughout the day. You hone in as you get tighter and tighter and tighter on people, but you’re also getting tighter in terms of time. You’re honing in on one little thing, and then you do the same again in the edit, with the sound effects, with the music, with the colour grading. Suddenly all this stuff comes together, and the notion that anyone could say, ‘This is precisely what it’s going to look like,’ to me is amazing." (David Fincher)

Yorgos Lanthimos' first requirement

[The director said he has certain requirements for any actor interested in working with him.] “First of all, I don’t meet anyone who hasn’t seen my films,” he said. “If they’re not interested them, why would we waste both of our times?” He also makes it clear that, despite his bizarre and often cryptic storytelling, he won’t provide any easy answers. “I will not become analytical about my work,” he said. “You read the screenplay, that’s what it is, and that’s what I know about it. There’s no other information I can give you as background for your character as a story, or why I wrote this. You read it, and either you respond to it and we do it or not.” (Yorgos Lanthimos)

Steven Soderbergh on confidence-vs-ego

"It's a strange line you have to walk between confidence – which is a good thing, you need confidence in order to lead people, to have people want to give you your – and ego.

Ego is what keeps you from hearing what the thing wants to be. The thing has to be above all of us, we are all submitting to what the thing wants to be. It tells you what it wants to be, if you're paying attention. What happens is, if you do that, you'll have ideas that don't work, that the thing spits out, but eventually the ratio of things that work begins to increase, because you begin to get a sense of the algorithm of what it wants." (Steven Soderbergh)

Danny Boyle On Lessons Learned (II)

"Ninety-five percent of your job is handling personnel. People who’ve never done it imagine that it’s some act, like painting a Picasso from a blank canvas, but it’s not like that. Directing is mostly about handling people’s egos, vulnerabilities and moods. It’s all about trying to bring everybody to a boil at the right moment. You’ve got to make sure everyone is in the same film. It sounds stupidly simple, like ‘Of course they’re in the same film!’ But you see films all the time where people are clearly not in the same film together." 

Ideally, you make a film up as you go along. I don’t mean that you’re irresponsible and you’ve literally got no idea, but the ideal is that you’ve covered everything—every angle—so that you’re free to do it any of those ways. Even on low-budget films, you have financial responsibilities. Should you fuck it up, you can still fall back on one of those ways of doing it. You’ve got Plan A to go back to, even though you should always make it with Plan B if you can. That way keeps it fresh for the actors, and for you.

What’s extraordinary about film is that you make it on the day, and then it’s like that forever more. On that day, the actor may have broken up with his wife the night before, so he’s inevitably going to read a scene differently. He’s going to be a different person. I come from theater, which is live and changes every night. I thought film was going to be the opposite of that, but it’s not. It changes every time you watch it: Different audiences, different places, different moods that you’re in. The thing is logically fixed, but it still changes all the time. You have to get your head around that.

I always have a bible of photographs, images by which I illustrate a film. I don’t mean strict storyboards, I just mean for inspiration for scenes, for images, for ideas, for characters, for costumes, even for props. These images can come from anywhere. They can come from obvious places like great photographers, or they can come from magazine advertisements—anywhere, really. I compile them into a book and I always have it with me and I show it to the actors, the crew, everybody!

I think you should always try to push things as far as you can, really. I call it “pushing the pram.” You know, like a stroller that you push a baby around in? I think you should always push the pram to the edge of the cliff—that’s what people go to the cinema for. This could apply to a romantic comedy; you push anything as far as it will stretch. I think that’s one of your duties as a director… You’ll only ever regret not doing that, not having pushed it. If you do your job well, you’ll be amazed at how far the audience will go with you.

You should be working at your absolute maximum, all the time. Whether you’re credited with stuff in the end doesn’t really matter. Focus on pushing yourself as much as you can.

A lesson I learned from A Life Less Ordinary was about changing a tone—I’m not sure you can do that. We changed the tone to a kind of Capra-esque tone, and whenever you do anything more “esque,” you’re in trouble. That would be one of my rules: No “esques.” Don’t try to Coen-esque anything or Capra-esque anything or Tarkovsky-esque anything, because you’ll just get yourself in a lot of trouble. You have to find your own “esque” and then stick to it. "
(Danny Boyle)