How much planning do you do before you start to shoot a scene?
As much as there are hours in the day, and days in the week. I think about a film almost continuously. I try to visualize it and I try to work out every conceivable variation of ideas which might exist with respect to the various scenes, but I have found that when you finally come down to the day the scene is going to be shot and you arrive on the location with the actors, having had the experience of already seeing some scenes shot, somehow it’s always different. You find out that you have not really explored the scene to its fullest extent. You may have been thinking about it incorrectly, or you may simply not have discovered one of the variations which now in context with everything else that you have shot is simply better than anything you had previously thought of. The reality of the final moment, just before shooting, is so powerful that all previous analysis must yield before the impressions you receive under these circumstances, and unless you use this feedback to your positive advantage, unless you adjust to it, adapt to it and accept the sometimes terrifying weaknesses it can expose, you can never realize the most out of your film.Stanley Kubrick
July 26, 1928 — March 7, 1999
"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
"Never marry someone who doesn’t love the movies you love. Sooner or later, that person will not love you."
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I told Miyazaki I love the “gratuitous motion” in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are.
“We have a word for that in Japanese,” he said. “It’s called ma. Emptiness. It’s there intentionally.”
Is that like the “pillow words” that separate phrases in Japanese poetry?
“I don’t think it’s like the pillow word.” He clapped his hands three or four times. “The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness, But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb.”
""There’s a great interview online with Terry Gilliam, can’t find it at the moment sadly. But, what he says about modern blockbusters is so spot-on, which is basically that in all the great spectacle films, something like 2001, what makes these films work isn’t the special effects, but rather the high-concepts, new worlds, and new ideas that these films profess. Filmmakers are now substituting ideas for action, hoping to get the same reaction from audiences, yet clearly this is greatly lacking."
"I like it when somebody tells me a story, and I actually really feel that that’s becoming like a lost art in American cinema."
"Silence is cinema! We are so used to sounds; we’re always talked at. Silence is very rare for us for a long duration of time. It makes people very uncomfortable. But what it does, it also forces us to perceive on a much deeper level because we can no longer just be told things. Silence is like gold. In terms of cinema from a story perspective, silence forces the audience to engage more, because if they’re not being told what to think, then they have to put in the subliminal elements. I love that personally and I think it’s an obligation we have, because then the audience and the film interact. You’re not just passive, you penetrate each other."
"Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives in the realm of entertainment towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood"
"I’ve lived on the border of financial destruction for the last 20 years, because the sheer joy of doing something your way is—you can’t define it. It’s like heroin. Every time that you express something, you have to prepare yourself for critique. It’s not like critique is a nice thing to get. We all don’t want to be yelled at for doing something wrong. But you begin to look at how people are critiquing, and it becomes interesting. So when people are violently reacting to an experience that you have given them at the same time that people are praising or loving it for the exact same thing—that’s when you know you have done something right. It makes them think. It makes them react. Art was not made to satisfy the masses in any way, and it never has. There is a great satisfaction in people cheering and booing at the same time."