Saturday Night Live's...

... Control Room !

Negative voices, negative people

"All the negative voices, all the negative people that you meet do not think that they are negative on creative people. They think they are helping you. They are doing it out of a genuine sense of concern and care. They think they are helping you avoid pain and disappointment and humiliation, and [actually] all they're doing is stifling you.” (Patton Oswalt)

Josh Locy on facing obstacles

"Every stage of [filmmaking] is a new challenge and a fresh experience, even from the beginning of getting people to read the script. That's hard. Getting them to read and understand it, that's hard. Getting them to see the vision of the film is hard. Then you go to finding a location, having the guy bail on you the day before, that's hard. Having people who you want to be in the movie who don't want to be in the movie, that's hard. The sun's dropping in the sky. That's hard. Everything is hard, but it's all rewarding. Everything is worth it. You have to just find new ways to solve old problems, and you have to keep pushing. No one's going to make your movie for you. You're the only one who has that spark. It starts with a spark that turns into a flame. You're the only one that has it. You've got to push." (NoFilmSchool interview on his film "Hunter-Gatherer")

Mark Romanek & David Fincher talk about filmmaking

”...And also that thing that you have with a narrative, with a movie, where you go, I’m so tired I can’t possibly stay awake and I’m so buzzed that I can’t possibly sleep. I never found this on commercials or videos, as much as I was always afraid of failing or letting people down. It’s horrible. It’s like you have one day off and you can’t really fall into a deep sleep, ’cause you’re going, Wow, we just found this thing on Thursday and it affected what we did on Friday and now we have to change up ’cause I had thought Monday was gonna be real meat-andpotatoes shoe leather to get me from here to here, but now this new thing has been introduced and now I have to start to wonder what kind of topspin it puts on the third act and, you know….”

Darren Aronofsky's Ten Commandments of Indie Filmmaking

via NoFilmSchool

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)

"Be prepared to not be involved"

"Joel Schumacher, who I consider to be one of the wisest people I’ve ever met, once told me a great thing: “You have to be very careful not to become the only person who cares, because then they have you. You have to be prepared at any moment to say, ‘You guys seem like you have it all under control and you have a very clear idea about what it is that you want. Why don’t you just do that? Why do you need me to be involved?’ ” The only way you’re ever going to be in control of what it is that you’re doing is to be prepared to not be involved.

I look at directors who say, “Well, I just have to do something. I haven’t done a movie in two years.” I’m like, “Really? You have to do something?” I feel like you shouldn’t do something—you should do the thing. You should be ready to go to the mat for it. You should be ready to say, “This is the way that this should be done.” So don’t care too much. That’s an unfair paraphrasing, but what Joel meant was you have to somehow impart how much you care about stuff to a number of other people and get them to care. You can’t think of it in terms of what you’re going to get out of it. You have to think of it in terms of planned obsolescence. “I’ll never be finished with it; at some point it’ll be finished with me.” (David Fincher)

Joe Carnahan on making indie movies in H'wood

from CINEFIX, via NoFilmSchool

Kubrick's "Notes on Film"

"The important thing in films is not so much to make successes as not to make failures, because each failure limits your future opportunities to make the films you want to make."

J.J. Abrams on "Start Trek into Darkness"

”Any movie, any story has a fundamental conversation happening during it. There’s a fundamental argument; there’s a central question. And I didn’t have it. (...) I felt like, in a weird way, it was a little bit of a collection of scenes that were written by my friends — brilliantly talented writers — who I somehow misled in trying to do certain things. And yet, I found myself frustrated by my choices, and unable to hang my hat on an undeniable thread of the main story. So then I found myself on that movie basically tap-dancing as well as I could to try and make the sequences as entertaining as possible.”

Danny Boyle On Lessons Learned (I)

”I say sort of semi-controversially or provocatively, your first film is your best film, always, because it has that innocence about it, about not knowing what you’re doing.”


”I began to learn how to contradict film culture just in the way films are made. I got much more into doing it in what you would call an unprofessional way. I’m not a big fan of the tautly professional films that do things ‘the right way.’ I think it’s not a great spur to creativity sometimes.”

”You learn sometimes that the most obvious fucking thing is the thing we need. And don’t try to avoid it, because sometimes you get all wrapped up in subtlety, but sometimes it’s the most obvious thing that you need to do.”

”The precision you have to bring is migraine-inducing, and the patience you have to have while you wait for CG. If I ever did another movie like that, I would take a break during editing. Editing is such an organic thing; you keep editing, even though you should have stopped. What you’re really doing is waiting for these CG effects to arrive and we should have taken six months off. Because what you’re doing is cutting the film and there are huge swaths of it you haven’t got. But the fact that they’re not there affects how you cut after it, so actually you’re distorting the film. I’d certainly advise anyone about big CG to build in a break.”

”[...] in reality, making a film, if you just make the facts, it doesn’t necessarily work and it doesn’t look truthful. And it’s because something else happens in art and film, which is that you have to represent truth rather than photograph it.”

”I learned that the dark stuff is always there. You might be doing the wholesome family entertainment as your day job, but at night the dark stuff is still there."

Marlon Brando's Secret A-List Acting School

featuring Sean Penn, Peter Coyote, Robin Williams, Tony Kaye and many more

LOVE's director's note

Chris Jones dixit

"Keep the investment to a minimum and the innovation to a maximum."

"(...) in the end it's not about how far we go, but how far we travel from our starting point (...)"

Werner Herzog dixit:

1. Always take the initiative.
2. There is nothing wrong with spending a night in jail if it means getting the shot you need.
3. Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey.
4. Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.
5. Learn to live with your mistakes.
6. Expand your knowledge and understanding of music and literature, old and modern.
7. That roll of unexposed celluloid you have in your hand might be the last in existence, so do something impressive with it.
8. There is never an excuse not to finish a film.
9. Carry bolt cutters everywhere.
10. Thwart institutional cowardice.
11. Ask for forgiveness, not permission.
12. Take your fate into your own hands.
13. Learn to read the inner essence of a landscape.
14. Ignite the fire within and explore unknown territory.
15. Walk straight ahead, never detour.
16. Manoeuvre and mislead, but always deliver.
17. Don’t be fearful of rejection.
18. Develop your own voice.
19. Day one is the point of no return.
20. A badge of honor is to fail a film theory class.
21. Chance is the lifeblood of cinema.
22. Guerrilla tactics are best.
23. Take revenge if need be.
24. Get used to the bear behind you.

Talent is great, but relationships get you hired.

says Chris Jones

Fincher dixit

”All shooting days are hard because whatever you’re left with you got to make the movie out of. I love actors, I love blocking, I love photography, and I love getting the band together to try and do something, but the commitment is daunting. You wake up at 6am and hours later that’s the scene. That’s what it’s going to be forever, and that makes me want to throw up a little. I hate that.”

(As the saying goes,) ”Movies aren’t finished, they’re abandoned. There are no right or wrong answers. There’s just more or less effective wardrobe or lighting.”