"The best advice I can give has little to do with actual writing; it has to do with thinking about people. I recommend that you practice creating fictional characters by trying to describe, privately, the people in your life. See if you can describe their characters without being so general that they could be anyone. Then check back in a few months. If your description has radically changed, you have a ways to go. You aren’t yet seeing other people as fully fleshed out others, but are mired in your own relationships with them. When you can describe people in ways that are both meaningful and consistent and survive the vicissitudes of your moods, then you know you’re getting somewhere."
"I had the standard movie geek childhood, because for as long as I can remember all I wanted to do was make movies."
— Paul Thomas Anderson
— Paul Thomas Anderson
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- Adelle Waldman
Stanley Kubrick - The Works
"Cinema is important — basically every art form comes to cinema. It involves music. Painting. Everything. It’s the closest we can come to life. A painting can only give you so much, I think. And music is very beautiful, but when they all come together…you’re really embracing everything. I don’t think some people realize, actually, how important it is."
Here are a few screenshots of my poster for a fictional Wes Anderson film festival, “Pack of Strays”. The top image was the front of the poster, designed to look like a corny family photo in a plaqued frame. I used the pen tool in Photoshop to cut out each character and did my best to correct the skin tones (a lot of Anderson’s films have a different tint to them). I wanted to maintain the concept of a mixed-matched group of misfits coming together. I took the idea from a quote from Anderson who said he believed he had created such consistent worlds that a character from one movie could walk into another and it would be believable. The following photos are page by page of the back of the poster, which is folded like a booklet. It outlines the various movies that are being shown and some info about the director.
"I am a child of cinema, and I am a cineaste, so everything I do is a reference to something I’ve heard or experienced or seen. And… we all do it, we all steal. The ones who claim they don’t, are obviously lying, because you do. You just have to make it your own."
The jewish barber’s speech from The Great Dictator (1940). A poor jewish barber looks just like the bad dictator and is mistaken for him. He uses his chance to deliver a speech to the people disguised as the Dictator. A speech of love and kindness.
Chaplin managed to create one of the most beautiful and epic speeches of all time in the end scene of The Great Dictator. This was also Chaplin’s first true talking picture and his best grossing film ever. This film and speech has also great significance because it was delivered just before the WW2 broke loose.
Gregory Peck, 1938
(UC Berkeley Yearbook)