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)

Unblind your eyes

"(...) we need to look at what scares us the most. We need to look at ourselves. What have we been willing to accept, out of fear, helplessness, a sense that things can’t be changed? What else are we turning a blind eye to, in all aspects of our lives? What else have we accepted that, somewhere within us, we know is deeply unacceptable? And what, now, will we do about it?" (Sarah Polley)

An interestingly bad year

“If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two imposters both the same…”  said Rudyard Kipling in his incomparable poem “If…”.   Well I can’t.  I pretend I can, but no, I prefer the triumphs.  Is that what they’re called ?  Those goals into the top corner.  Those victories.  Yes, I prefer those imposters to the failures.  But people always say wise self-help guru stuff like “you learn more from your failures”  or “crisis and opportunity is the same word in Chinese”  or even “I get knocked down but I get up again”.  You know?   I prefer not to get knocked down at all.   I feel like my life was built on crises.  But still they come.

 1994 was a watershed year for me, looking back.  After that incredible review in the LA Times I did not work for a whole year. I was going up for three films per week.  Everything that was made in 1994, I auditioned for.  Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead.  The Usual Suspects.  Crimson Tide.  Devil In A Blue Dress.  Heat.  Jumanji.   True Romance.  The Quick & The Dead.  And many many others lost to the mists of time.  Learning lines, forming character, turning up with well-chosen clothing and delivering the scene, over and over and over.  Fincher helping me with auditions sometimes.   Meeting after meeting.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  No.  And No.   I’d hit the glass ceiling.  Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken were getting the gigs.  My gigs.  How could I break through that invisible barrier ?

I was so green, really, so innocent.  But I was certainly living life.   "Learning To Be."

Then as summer turned to late summer and even later summer (you don’t really get winter in Los Angeles) – our thoughts turned to work and I carried on getting NO from meetings.  They’ve gone another way.  They loved you but it’s not going to work out this time.  Or even worse : silence.  The dwindling hope that finally extinguishes.

I’ve thought about this moment many times, and I don’t know why I didn’t seize it.  His dream must have seemed so close that he could scarcely fail to grasp it.  He could not know that it was already behind him…wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald…The Great Gatsby’s final paragraph.

It was an incredible opportunity in retrospect.  If I’d been cast in that role, it would certainly have changed my career.  I absolutely under-anticipated the stress of that meeting, thinking in my foolishness that David holding the door open would be perhaps enough to swing it for me.   It was a harsh lesson.   Many times I have played it over in my mind, re-entered the room, better prepared, psyched-up, played the scene properly like I’d planned it.   But I didn’t get it.  Even today, writing this, it bites me.  It was a gift horse and I gave it a thorough dental examination.   Oh well.  I’m still here.  Some things are just not meant to be.  No regrets.  "Learning To Be."

Like all hinge moments one cannot eventually regret the way it went.  If I’d been cast in Seven we would have stayed in LA.  Or at least I would.  First and biggest problem.  We wouldn’t have bought a house in Brighton.  Tom, Millie and Lucy wouldn’t have moved down.   Scarlett and Tom wouldn’t have met.  Skye wouldn’t have been born.  I wouldn’t have played in The Brighton Beach Boys.  And on and on.  You cannot unmake a moment, even in your wishes.  And thus, once again, writing out one of my haunted moments in a blog post has allowed to me to understand the wound and clarify the misty darkness which surrounds it a little bit more.   And it becomes not a defeat but just another chapter in My Pop Life. " (Ralph Brown's blog)

The great difference between screen acting and theater acting

"The great difference between screen acting and theater acting is that screen acting is about reacting - 75% of the time, great screen actors are great reactors. When it comes to film, the director tells the audience what to look at. That doesn't happen on stage. When the dialog stops, people don't know where to look." (Nicolas Roeg)