Blowing Up

A salesman exposes himself as a petty thief on a friendly sales call.

This short is based on very similiar actions to Klepto. We're going to add dialogue, but keep it inside in a single location. We're also adding more sophiticated camera moves with a Fisher 11 dolly. I'm allowing more time and for a bigger crew. My goal is to focus on directing with emphasis on really looking for the moments and establishing and maintaining tone.

Bandwidth Exceeded

One of my producing partners provided me with a username to an incredible website that makes imbdpro look like kid's stuff. He warned me that it's going to be like crack for me. Problem is, I'm too exhausted to smoke crack. It's been a busy week. My goodness. I've been all over the place physically and mentally (somehow I'm staying grounded otherwise). I shot a short, worked crew on two films, worked my day job, took meetings on an upcoming project and put in a lot of time planning and networking for the imminent day job to freelance transistion. I even made it to a friend's opening on First Thursday.
Last night I put the baby to bed at eight and fell asleep with her. Guess I needed the rest.
I woke up this morning and knocked out a script for this month's short, Petty. I'm meeting with the producer later today. I'm going to try to be really hands off on this one. I'm going to let the producer produce it. And the AD do his thing and so on. Just direct. Weird, but very good practice letting go.
I've refrained from getting involved in anything at all tomorrow. A day of rest.
For the rest of this morning I'm going to try to summon the bandwidth to dig into studiosystem.com. We'll see if I get addicted.

¡viva!
signore direttore

The Master Says 142

I discovered that what's really important for a creator isn't what we vaguely define as inspiration or even what it is we want to say, recall, regret, or rebel against. No, what's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.

Federico Fellini

The Master Says 141

There's no such thing as simple. Simple is hard.

Martin Scorsese

24 Hour Film People

Yesterday at 5 was our call time for Reflux. We got off to a rocky start but settled into some good work. We wrapped at 4am. I woke up yesterday at around six. Went to sleep at five the next morning, this morning. I slept in until nine am and then went to work as a grip on the Pander Brothers film, ID. We were released at eight thirty, totaling twenty seven and half hours of filmmaking with a brief four hours of sleep.

Buzzing,

Signore Operaio

The Master Says 140

When you're sent something and read it, either you can see it while you read it, or you can't.

Steven Soderbergh

Film Festival

Several things conspired this evening to air out a lot of old film footage. I have a few unfinished films to my (pending) credit. I've written them off and I've sworn them off. I've been nagged by them and shamed by them. But you know, they're all pretty good. Perhaps not as brilliant as I once hoped they would be. Once upon a time, I hoped only for superlative success. How else could I be good enough? I mean nobody would want anything to do with me unless I made brilliant films and took Hollywood by storm. Right?
You don't have to answer that.
We're filming February's short Saturday. It's called Reflux -- a man finds a few moments of self-acceptance in exposing a shameful personal experience. Or something like that.
Anytime soon I should be able to hold my own film festival. I feel the forces gathering to revisit and complete many past projects. And the new ones are coming along as well.

Stride On,
Signore Direttore

The Master Says 139

You can love someone for their defects and their differences from you.

Guillermo del Toro

The Master Says 138

Change in all things is sweet.

Aristotle

Two Weeks Notice

I gave notice at my day job yesterday. I have mixed feelings about it - I'm swimming in the sea between excitement and fear, lighting here and there on sadness. I want to say overall that I have very good feelings about it, but I think it's more accurate to say it is clearly the right time to do it and leave it at that for now.

nc

Dirty Old Man

I say that with extreme irony in reference to Peter O'Toole in Venus. Perhaps it speaks to my own weak character, but I found nothing dirty about the old fella's lust for the young woman. It was uncomfortable to watch at times. And I wouldn't have it any other way. Life is coming to an end for the old Lothario as he pays the price to touch youth once again. Much as in life, it is hardly as simple as that.
Venus is a beautiful little film that masterfully paints the nuances of being human. One of those movies that makes you hold your water for fear of missing even a moment. O'Toole was brilliant. Every word, breath, movement saturated with truth. Even sitting still in the distance, he brings life to the frame. And what beautiful frames, many like a painting. And the light, absolutely unsentimental. The girl was pretty splendid herself, rising like a contemporary Venus from the ugly coarseness and shallow self-absorption of watching daytime telly to become a beauty sensitive to the world around her quite worthy of the great man's love.
I have yet to see Last King of Scotland, but my heart if not my money is on Lawrence of Arabia for the Oscar. His eyes are as stunning as ever.

Go see this film.

Signore Direttore

The Master Says 137

The future you shall know when it has come; before then, forget it.

Aeschylus

The Master Says 136

You've got to find some way of saying it without saying it.

Duke Ellington

The Master Says 135

Being a screenwriter is not enough for a full creative life.

William Goldman

The Master Says 134

Excellence is not an act but a habit.

Aristotle

The Master Says 133

All the characters in my films are fighting these problems, needing freedom, trying to find a way to cut themselves loose, but failing to rid themselves of conscience, a sense of sin, the whole bag of tricks.

Michelangelo Antonioni

Checking In 2.13.07

I exchanged emails with a producer friend of mine about an upcoming project. He has extensive experience making films budgeted under $500,000. Something you and I might envy, but that has worn him ragged. His advice to me was to make sure our post- budget was solid going in, that "chasing finishing funds is a fool's errand". We weren't counting on finishing funds, but we haven't firmly researched and commited our post-production budget.

What else? I'm glad to have the last two weeks of chasing my tail with software stuff behind me. I dug into getting the edit suite a bit more organized and tidy last night. I think part of me likes the chaos that it's been. It's given me an excuse not to go down there. I'm beginning to practice letting go of the results more regularly, which makes editing more enjoyable and possible. I'm ready to remove the obstacles of chaos.
With some reluctance I've begun the search for a new assitant. I have a new perspective on the relationship. JKM spoiled me in some ways. He was very capable and I was too dependent on him, thus letting him run a bit autonomously. Which ultimately wasn't good for me as I tended to ... well, let's just leave it as I was too far from the details of how things were running. I've been forced by his departure to take good stock of the gear and the projects. In the past I've often relied on assistants to get me organized without starting them off with some structure. I'm focusing on setting up better organization.
Which is difficult because I'm flooded with inspiration right now. And my office is a mess from closing the acting studio and dumping it all in the big room.
As you might know, I've made the commitment to shoot a monthly short. Last month's project isn't finished, so I don't want to start something new and ambitious until I've brought that one closer to completion. Not finishing projects has been a terrible habit for me. I've been a bit stressed becuase I want to keep my commitment to creating a new short each month, but also mind my commitment to finishing things.
The other morning I did some journal writing. I stumbled onto something that was awesome to get out. It wasn't my intention when I sat down to write, but I think it's going to be the text for a very simple piece that can be shot in an evening.
I've also been thinking of filmmaking as folk art. Matt McCormick often refers to it as such. As does someone else close to me. It's a very liberating perspective.

Tonight I'm meeting with one of the actors from the Made Crooked experiment. He'll be the first person to see it aside from JKM and I. I've made another screening date with another cast memeber later in the week. I look forward to seeing it a few times with different people. I think it will be good way to absorb its lessons. I've been striving to treasure it as a very valuable resource rather than as a failed filmmaking endeavor.

A River Dertchee
Signore Direttore

The Master Says 132

The individual life is a dream.

John Patrick Shanley

Klepto Update

Even though I haven't posted about Klepto for the past two weeks doesn't mean I haven't been working on it. A software bug prevented getting a crucial clip into the project. I spent hours toubleshooting and surfing message boards until I discovered a solution. The workaround required software that I own but is missing. I arranged to borrow a friend's copy, but had to work around his schedule to get it. Aren't you glad I didn't keep you posted? I'm glad it's over.
The edit is now ready for audio.

Signore Direttore

ROAD - At long last

I finally got to see the fruit of our labor last night. It's been three and half years since we finished shooting. The film has been done for almost two years, but the producers have been reluctant to hand out DVDs until a deal was in place.
Anyway, I watched it. I liked most of it. It looked really good. The cinematographer, Antoine, was clearly talented and a great person to collaborate with. I thought the art direction was pretty good, if I say so myself. As with good hair and makeup, you don't notice it when it's good. As I watched certain scenes, I remember working so hard and then seeing it look so simple on screen. Which is good and a testament to my willingness to let go of some measure of ego at the time.
The perfomances were really good. Ebon was great as I knew he would be. He's a good actor and it was very good casting. Catherine was good, too. They won the Best Acting Award at the 2004 LA Film Festival for ROAD. The bit players - James Urbaniak, Jane Houdyshell, Peter Appel, Marty Zentz - were great. I saw myself in tow quick scenes. They happened so fast it could have been anybody.
Leslie, the director, clearly had a vision for the film. There is a nice tone through much of it. In the end, I don't think it delivers on its promise. Most films made for less than a hundred thousand rarely do.
For all of its ups and downs, I'm proud to have been a part of it.

It's playing on Showtime this month. DVD release comes later in the year.

nc

The Master Says 131

I went through a phase where I thought nostalgia was a bad thing.

Dario Argento

The Master Says 130

I mean simply to say that I want my characters to suggest the background in themselves, even when it is not visible. I want them to be so powerfully realized that we cannot imagine them apart from their physical and social context even when we see them in empty space.

Michelangelo Antonioni

Folk Wisdom 025

Don't overlook the wonder of the ordinary.

The Master Says 129

The directing of a picture involves coming out of your individual loneliness and taking a controlling part in putting together a small world. A picture is made. You put a frame around it and move on. And one day you die. That is all there is to it.

John Huston

The Master Says 128

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stay there, lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again... but also, she will never sit down on a cold one any more.

Mark Twain

The Master Says 127

I tend to be attracted to characters who are up against a wall with very few alternatives. And the film then becomes an examination of how they cope with very few options. And that's, I guess, what interests me in terms of human behavior.

William Friedkin

That Never Happens

Checked my email just before lunch yesterday to find a message asking where to send a deferment check for a movie I worked on four years ago. Not only am I going to get paid some money I wrote off long ago, but the film is going to play on Showtime this month.
I've heard the film isn't great, but some good people worked hard on it and I'm sure there's at least some good stuff.
I was the production designer and had a very tiny part.

So check it out if you have Showtime.

It's called Road by Leslie Mcleave. It plays on Showtime Women on the following dates:

Tuesday 4:25 AM
Feb 10 6:30 PM
Feb 18 4:30 PM
Feb 21 10:30 PM
Feb 27 5:35 PM

The Master Says 126

This applies to many film jobs, not just editing: half the job is doing the job, and the other half is finding ways to get along with people and tuning yourself in to the delicacy of the situation.

Walter Murch

The Master Says 125

I'm very comfortable with failure. I'm very comfortable being the guy who disappoints people.

Steven Soderbergh

The Master Says 124

I really dig tall women.

Sam Peckinpah

Folk Wisdom 024

A young filmmaker can commit a lot of energy to a superior posture about the state of things - but my own experience has taught me that fashionable cynicism can cover the fear of what the real challenge is: doing good work.

Andrew Wagner

The Master Works 003

Heaven
2002
Tom Tykwer, Director
Krzysztof Kieslowski & Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Screenplay

The interrogation scene. Philippa (Cate Blanchett) has just learned she victimized others than she intended. The cold and determined woman introduced in the film's opening scenes crumbles. In the limbo of her uncertainty, she turns to Filippo (Giovanni Ribisi), the young carabinieri that has just moments before offered to interpret her testimony.
The scenes leading up to this moment use screen direction and motion to direct our eyes and carry characters upward to heaven, downward to hell, to the political left and right and, in the case of Filippo, smack dab in the middle. Philippa's turn to Filippo begins to restore her humanity. She was resolute in her descent until learning she had failed to eliminate her intended target. She links herself to the man in the middle and rises from hell to limbo.
Blanchett handles this moment expertly. It's in her body - every given circumstance explicated in the scene resides within her.
Ribisi is equally brilliant. He does his work with his eyes - they watch closely, the subtext and his inner life happening behind them.
In the final moments of the scene, Phillipa collapses. As she fades into her faint, Filippo watches and calmly alerts the prosecutor. When Philippa falls, Filippo immediately moves to help her but restrains himself and remains in his chair. It is quite apparent it is the last time he will sit dutifully still.

The Master Says 123

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.

Jane Austen

Requiescat In Pace

I spent the morning at a memorial for my friend Helen today. The first hour and half in a Catholic church and the latter part of the day at a potluck. I've shed a few tears remembering her today and over the past week since she passed away. She is truly one of those people that will live on in the hearts of many. Which makes her death less sad somehow. I'm not a believer in the after-life and all that heavenly stuff, but there's something eternal about Helen. She was one of those rare people that gave her love without expectation. Whenever I saw her she would stop whatever she was doing and give me a hug. She always asked me about my children with genuine interest. In fact, if I ever tried to gripe or gossip about anything, she would gently steer the conversation toward happier and gentler things. She never raised her voice, even if someone wasn't listening to her. If she was committed to what she had to say, she just kept on quietly until people started to listen.
There was a slideshow of her at the potluck. I stood with different friends looking at Helen in all the different phases of her life: her wedding day, school, Africa with the Peace Corps, at work, with family and friends at her home and in nature. She had the same easy smile in every photograph. She was a beautiful woman.
I'm a better person for knowing her, though I won't miss her because she gave a small part of herself to me to keep forever.

nc

The Master Says 122

I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.

Frank Capra

Feature Length Rough Cut

I just left an intense couple of hours in our editing suite watching a cut of our "shoot a feature film in three days without letting the actors see a script or even fully disclose our intentions to them" experiment. If you ask me if I like it, I really can't say. I have way too much baggage to come to any easy conclusion. I will say that the more I resist the pull of my various expectations and look at it as a record of the work that we did and the decisions that were made, it is a tremendously valuable on-going experience. On-going is key. Part of my unrealized expectations is my desire to be done with it. I wonder if that is realsitic. Perhaps it isn't a fair comparison, but am I ever to be done with my children? Surely not. My mother has been dead for nearly a decade and our relationship lives on. Why should I want to end it in the first place? Because it didn't manifest into an award winner? Because it didn't launch my career?

There is one scene that I really like. I didn't write it prior to the shoot. I came up with the idea in the middle of working and ad-libbed it. You can hear me feeding lines and questions to the actors in the rough cut. There's a lot of space in the performances and I think it's the most successful scene in terms of tone. I think had more of the scenes been shot in the way that I asked, there might be more scenes like this. Perhaps not.
Though JKM confessed that he was terrified throughout the shoot and gave up on my approach, deciding to shoot it as a documentary. He just told me this tonight, which was news to me that helped make some sense of things.
Over and over again, I learn that as a director you have to stay on top of your vision. Nobody else is going to do it for you.
Another thing that comes to mind as I watch this film is that I've got to work harder to give up trying to make things work and dig deeper into what I want to see and what I want and need to explore thematically.
There's a lot to learn if I am teachable.

Burning Eyes,
Signore Direttore

Nobody Knows Anything

I finished the rough cut of Klepto. I enjoyed doing it. I haven't enjoyed editing for a very long time. At first I thought it was because I'd done a better job shooting Klepto than I had earlier films. There's some truth in that, but it's not entirely the reason for my new found joy in the process. I'm learning to pay attention to my eyes -- what they really see rather than what I direct them to see. Usually what I direct my eyes to see has a lot to do with the logic of making things work in terms of continuity. Yet Walter Murch puts continuity on the bottom of the heirachy of an editor's concerns. I've known this for a few years but I couldn't let go of it when editing until recently. It requires a certain degree of faith. Editing is less mathematical than sensual, it turns out.
Or maybe not, because as William Goldman says, Nobody knows anything.
Yesterday I learned a few more things about the movie business that confirms my advice to the aspiring actors at my studio: Do this because you love it and for no other reason! For years many told me I was crazy to try to direct a script I'd written. Now it's hard to get people to get behind it becuase I've said I don't want to direct it. For a long time I thought it had to do with the nature of the material. It doesn't. It's just a bloody tough business to break into.
I'm not discouraged. I still want to see that film get made. Maybe I will. There's other stuff in front of me right now. Really awesome stuff that needs my atention. I'm going to pay attention to that and have faith that when the time is right, the time will be right.
Billy Wilder says he tried to make pictures that he liked and hoped others would like them, too. I was a very successful club promoter for a number of years in San Francisco and New York. Basically my formula came down to this: I threw parties that I would want to go to. So I'm going to stick to writing and making films that I want to see, and we'll see what happens.
One last thing. An acquaintance of mine has a film in competition at Sundance this year. When I heard the news I was both a little proud and a little envious. His film was reviewed a couple of days ago. Something to the effect that in Cannes people would have thrown stuff, but in America they just laughed at all the wrong places. Voila! Good-bye envy, hello shadenfreude! By the way, I'm not particularly proud of being envious or taking pleasure in his misfortune, it's just the way it is. For now.
Besides -- NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING -- and that includes me.

Umanemente,
Signore Direttore

The Master Says 121

I just loved playing a man who was unafraid of making an idiot of himself in the process of falling in love. I found that admirable.

Ben Kingsley

The Master Says 120

A filmmaker has almost the same freedom as a novelist has when he buys himself some paper.

Stanley Kubrick

The Master Says 119

Style is a fraud. I always felt the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.

Willem de Kooning

Klepto Assembly

In spite of a severe cold, NFL conference playoffs, our wedding anniversary and my only day off this week, I just finished the assembly of Klepto.
There's something there. Some nice shots and performances. It's all going to cut together. There was one shot that is unusable because the main picture car and some crew are in the background. It was at the end of the day. I was helping the actor hit a mark and Jordan was watching focus. The performance isn't quite right to boot - actor trying to concentrate on hitting the mark more than what's appening in the moment. So I just went to the next shot and kind of like it better anyway.
Overall, it's a very quiet film beyond the lack of dialogue. I am not sure if everything works, maybe it does, but at this point I opted not to get trigger happy. I'm not going to try to figure it out yet. I think this is the first time I've ever cut something where I just laid clips down without looking at transistions or what I had so far until I was at the final shot. Anyway, the response I had to the doubt I experienced at one point was that I'll do my best and listen to what others have to say about what works and what doesn't when the time comes.
Process. Process. Process. Assembly today. Rough cut tomorrow. Per gradi.

Pazientemente,
Signore Direttore

il universo apri

I'm feeling really good about the way 2007 is starting off. Moving on from the acting studio has freed up a lot more energy than I imagined. I'm collaborating with a couple of awesome, very accomplished people on a big project. I'll talk more about that when I feel it's appropriate. I'm excited about it, but I'm doing a lot of other things in the meantime instead of waiting for that to happen as I've done in the past.
Last year, I made friends with a very talented actor that moved here from LA. Recently we started hanging out again. He's such a great guy. And very funny. He's a good writer and has some very compelling stuff for which he's been looking for someone to collaborate. We've been having breakfast together a lot this week, just having laughs and getting to know each other. He addressed it more directly at breakfast yesterday. My first fear in these situations is that someone wants me to produce something for them. I'm a producer certainly, but more by default than ambition. I produce films in order to get my films made. Whenever I've worked as a producer on someone else's film, I've been frustrated to at least some degree.
Same with editing and art directing. And acting, though not as much if I'm having fun with the role. Anyway, at the end of last year I was trying to focus my attention solely on writing. I was thinking of giving directing up for awhile. I told a few people including the agency packaging OG. (Which, by the way, isn't helping it move forward any faster) Then I produced a short for someone. I was on set helping an inexperienced young aspirant and I was frustrated once again. I thought, why am I going to give up on directing? I've got the skills and the gear and the contacts and the ideas to produce a quality short in a weekend for next to nothing; why not do it for myself a few more times? Most of all, I have the passion for it. I love it and I can't deny it. Writing is cool. I'm pretty good at it. Maybe even better than I am at directing. But it's a means to an ends for me. I only write the stories so I can make them. Which brings me back to yesterday.
So he brings up the possibility of working together and I prepare for him to tell me he wants to direct. I did a pretty good job of putting that out of my mind as I listened to his pitch. It's always nice to listen to a good idea. There were elements of Beautiful Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. So we chat about that for a minute. Then he throws out another pitch for a different script. Also very good, sort of High Fidelity meets Permanent Midnight. The ideas start flying in my head. I hear a lot of directors say that they can't imagine directing something they didn't write. I don't feel that way at all. I like the tradition of the theater where writers rarely direct.
All this was very welcome and inspiring. I had yet to ask the question though. The moment finally came, What role do you want to play in realizing these projects? I just want to act, dude!, he said. That's all I want to do, he continued, I just come up with these ideas and write to keep from going insane waiting for my next gig.
I didn't walk away giddy, no not at all. I was perfectly calm because it just felt right. I don't have expectations and I'm comfortable with what we're both bringing to the table. Like the King said, Ambition is a dream with a V8. So many of my past collaborations have been a lot of talk about horsepower, but we've been running on six cylinders and a weak chassis. To make it worse, I've often been firing five of those cylinders. On projects where I am better matched such as OG, the hot rod is still idling in the garage. When she finally gets out, she's going to lay some rubber, but that day hasn't come.
Funny that I was hoping to run into S to ask him to act in one of my monthly shorts. I guess it's true that if we only got what we asked for, we'd be selling ourselves short.
I've also made another acquaintance with a potential collaborator. I went out on a limb and introduced myself to her and she responded very positively. She's a beautiful woman with a lot of charisma. I have an idea for a little texture piece we could make together the next time I go to LA.
In the past when the universe has opened up to me, I've often closed it down trying to keep it to myself. Or by asking even more of it than has been offered.

A river dertch,
Signore Direttore

The Master Says 118

I'm just like Fassbinder, ... but without the drugs and the whores.

Steven Soderbergh

Signing Autographs

I signed about fifteen autographs today. Yep. I'm a celebrity in the eyes of a class of fifth graders in Aloha. To be honest, remembering how excited those kids were to get the crew's autographs after shooting a segment of an educational training video in their classroom puts a new perspective on the past couple of days. It's pretty easy to get cynical about doing this type of work. I've been taking the possession of a hard-earned set of skills and a lot of expensive equipment for granted.
Those kids were so unjaded and very good little actors. I told them I should have been asking for their autographs. Which is kind of bullshit to have talked the talk instead of putting a pen and paper back in their hands.
The methods in the teacher training were sound and even insprirational. The content consisted primarily of strategies for more active reading. I certainly know some actors that would benefit from stronger reading skills. I learned a few thinks about pedagogy as well.
Anyway, it's good to account for the ease in which I fall into negative thinking.

¡viva!
nc

The Master Says 117

Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine.

Elvis Presley

The Master Says 116

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.

Mark Twain

The Master Says 115

A problem is a chance for you to do your best.

Duke Ellington

The Michael Caine Axiom

Michael Caine asserts that if you're working too hard, you're not doing it right. Well, I think part of the problem I've had finishing films has had a lot to do with the what I've completed on set. I've long agonized on things coming together, having seen many projects languish over the years. Earlier on I missed a lot: I never slated shots, I didn't understand transistions and coverage, problems with sound, sound, sound. One of the biggest problems I had was with the writing. I tried to do too much with the story. I wasn't skilled enough to let it be simple. If you asked me what something was about, I gave a convoluted plot and thematic summary, rather than a simply stated premise. I've long heard that successful films are about one thing. My films were much deeper than that; I mean why say it simply when you can make it complicated? In terms of coverage, I either didn't know how to do it very well. Again, why take the time to understand film grammar? I'm way smarter than that. More notoriously, I held the arrogant opinion that I could forego coverage by letting the action play out in the master or, even worse, cut the film in the camera. Just about every filmmaker I know that cuts in the camera makes very wooden and mannered films. Too many of us have been seduced by the Robert Rodriquez mythos. The few filmmakers that let things play out in the master successfully are bona fide masters such as Woody Allen, Billy Wilder, Andrei Tarkovsky and most masterfully of all, Hou Tsien Tsien. I'm not ready to make worthwhile attempts at that just yet.

Not a single film since my first film, Nora Mae, has cut together easily. Until now. With the new technology of P2 cards, logging and digitizing is a much more direct task. Especially when every shot is slated. Now all that has to be done is select the take I like for each shot, set in and out points and drop it in the timeline. Right on down the shot list. There's no anguish, because the story is elegantly simple and was pre-visualized well - storyboards and test shots. Transistions were well considered in pre-visualiztion, too. So I don't have to work too hard to get a rough cut. If I decide to get tricky later on, that will be a choice rather than a compromise. All this bluster isn't to say it's a perfect film. I'm no longer concerned with making a perfect film and what that could do for my vaunted career. Klepto is just a little exercise in making movies that I'm going to finish and let whomever sees it judge it for themselves.

One more thing saved me from a hellish post-production relationship with this project -- no sound. Klepto is a non-verbal film. There's a temp track of location sound for reference, but I plan to record and build a soundtrack after I have a cut. Come to think of it, Nora Mae was the same deal. I'm feeling a bit exposed and vulnerable to admit that after all these years I still can't make a sound-sync film without having to work too hard. Alack, I am who I am and I am where I'm at. Oh, the pain of getting ahead of oneself. Good thing it's never too late to start over. All the better since I have all the experience of failed past attempts at a number of projects beyond my abilities. Oh, the joy of being a human learning to make films.

Anyway, Klepto should be finished within the next week or two if I can continue to embrace its imperfections and enjoy the progress I've made as a filmmaker by being right-sized.

Humbly yours,
Signore Direttore

The Master Says 114

Every once in a while, when the audience is expecting to see one thing, you have to show them something else.

Conrad Hall

Klepto

A chronic petty thief extends the pain of his affliction to a co-worker who gives him a ride home.

We shot the film today. All thirty-one shots, many of them in a moving vehicle on city streets. Everything takes so much longer when shooting with vehicles. Also it was a sunny day contrary to the weather forecast earlier in the week. So I didn't plan on having to limit our driving with respect to shadows. I was looking forward to an overcast, low-contrast look, but the sunlight gave us some nice flares, interesting shadows and very deep focus.

It was a hectic day as I knew it would be. Things went well - of course there were the usual frustrations, but they were minor and didn't hold us up too much. I overbooked myself as is not uncommon. I did a lot of rigging, producing, dolly gripping, camera assisting, art direction and assistant directing. I guess I was transpo captain as well. I also managed to do a bit of directing. I liked what we shot. I think the actors did a fine job as did our tiny crew which consisted of a make-up artist and a very helpful but inexperienced grip. (I missed Efrem's intuitive multi-tasking abilities, but he was on a paying job.)

In some ways I feel like I'm developing some bad habits by doing so much myself. I was sucessful at letting Jordan frame the shots and keeping my hands off the camera in that sense. I'm afraid that the times that I got frustrated or needed to remind everyone that we had to move it didn't support the actors as well as I think they deserve. I'm not going to be too hard on myself. I didn't yell at anyone and I treated everyone with respect. It's something I always want to improve upon. I really want to be able to say, Great, now let's try it this way. I have a terrible habit of pointing out what didn't go right. Even though I've mananged to reduce the frequency that I do it and do it a kinder tone than in the past, I want to stop doing it altogether.

We were shooting a few shots at a bus stop, which prompted TriMet to issue a 9-1-1 alert. Apparently there's some concern that any filming near public transportation is possibly a terrorist cell at work. It struck me as a bit absurd, however the man that confronted us was very kind and allowed us to continue shooting, so I shouldn't complain too much about it.

One of the things that I really enjoyed today was that my ego didn't seem to be too involved. I was in the process of doing a job that I'm getting better at. I wasn't thinking of the results. Nor was I ever conscious of demonstrating how impressive I am as a filmmaker. I don't like to admit that I've tended toward narcissism all too frequently in the past. Poseur!

Another challenge was being forced to think on my feet about a few shots under extreme pressure. We had limited hours of daylight and we were running a half hour behind after the first hour. In the end we wrapped fifteen minutes early, so we must have been doing something right. Anyway, one of the things that frustrated me on But A Dream was feeling turned around as we moved around the location from shot to shot. Today I was better at keeping things straight. And I let go a bit more. Maybe it had to do with the fact that BAD cost seven thousand dollars to get in the can while Klepto set me back about seventy bucks.

I'm definitely getting better at shooting the films. The next challenge is finishing them.

Exhausted,
Signore Direttore

The Master Says 113

I think people who have faults are a lot more interesting than people who are perfect.

Spike Lee

¡EuroPop Invasion!

Almodovar and Saint Etienne. Together. Oh my. Sugary melancholy fun. I love it.

The Master Says 113

I am at war with the obvious.

William Eggleston

The Master Says 112

In other words, I am interested in a river only if a bridge crosses it.

Nestor Almendros

The Master Says 111

Some actors are very intelligent, but is not necessarily with their intelligence that they act.

jean Renoir

The Master Says 110

The stage is life, music, beautiful girls, legs, breasts, not talk or intellectualism or dried-up academics.

Harold Clurman

Playing It Fast (and Sappy)

It's time to admit something: I have always loved heightened and melodramatic language in film. I'm not eager to admit it as I've long been seduced by the postures and trappings of realism and naturalism. I like what Mamet says about this topic, something about people going to see film and theater to hear things said that they would love to get away with in life. I think this is why I prefer Fassbinder to Cassavetes. Scorcese has always been a favorite, too. Of course it's his actions that are more operatic, but there are lines delivered by DeNiro - aka The King of the Mumbling Method Men - that may seem ordinary and naturalistic that are truly contrived. I'm thinking of his job interview in Taxi Driver - "Anytime, anywhere." Come to think of it, Taxi Driver is a great big fat lady of a melodrama. "You talking to me?" Come on, that's pure Kabuki. And I love it! As much now as I did when my mom and I used to act it out back in 1977. (How can I not be a melodrama fan if one of my fondest memories of childhood is imitating Travis Bickle with my mom?)
Another of my favorite films is Sweet Smell of Success, which was a box-office failure ironically. It's so heightened, it's borderline camp. Clifford Odet's rewrote Ernest Lehman's original screenplay. I love Odets, but whenever I assigned his plays at my acting studio, actor-students complained. Most of them were too intent on playing everything natural. Playing it natural usually means grinding everything to a slow, methodical (Aha! There's it is: method/methodical!!!) destruction of any dramatic tension. Odets's writing doesn't work that way. He understood it very well, "My dialogue may seem overwritten, too wordy, too contrived. Don't let it worry you. You'll find that it works if you don't worry too much about the lines themselves. Play the situations, not the words. And play them fast."
Now that I think about it, it's not only good advice at getting the seemingly preposterous to play, it's pretty truthful. In life, we often have to speak fast if we want to be heard. Maybe not in a town as laid back as Portland, but in New York for sure. If you want to get your two cents in, you had better be sharp and quick.
This month's short, Klepto, is a film without dialogue. I am trying to design the shots so that the tiny little movements of the compulsive thief's hands play on a grand scale. I'm looking to Sergio Leone for inspiration - all those moments of anticipation such as the beginning of Once Upon a Time in the West.
Next month's short, Friends of Bill, has a highly improbable set up with a lot of heightened language. I'll have to remember Odets's advice.

2007 is off to a good start. Getting my daily meditation and exercise. No fiction reading as yet, but I did put a collection of TC Boyle stories on my nightstand. My new camera is being used as I write on Holly & Grace's newest endeavor. I stopped by set yesterday and saw the camera with the Mini35 adapter on it. Jordan and I get to do a camera test with that tomorrow night after they wrap. I'm very excited to see the results. For those of you who might not know what a Mini35 is -- it's a device that allows 35mm cine lenses to be mounted to a digital camcorder. You get much improved optics and the power of selective focus.
What else? We're shooting Klepto next weekend, so I've been busy location scouting and storyboarding that. The walks I've been taking in the industrial area around Holgate have been inspriring. There's talk of a WalMart going in over there. Hopefully the significant oppostion to that will prevail.
And we booked a lucrative three-day, two-camera shoot for a director out of New York. It's some sort of teacher training CD-ROM. Not too painful. Perhaps even an opportunity to learn something.
I got to speak to Eric Edwards on the phone the other day, he seems to be a very nice man. He's shooting a short that the French invited Gus Van Sant to make to play at Cannes this spring. I was able to drop by the set for a brief visit yesterday.
Lastly, I saw Notes on a Scandal last night. Can't go wrong seeing that one. Pretty easy to get lost in the performances -- Dame Judi is amazing as always, Cate Blanchett continues to mesmerize and Bill Nighy is a gem.

A Big Pizza Pie,
Signore Direttore

The Master Says 109

Without discipline, there's no life at all.

Katharine Hepburn

The Master Says 108

The thing about not reading scripts and my wanting a director to tell me a story is a risk I need to take. I need that real fear.

Judi Dench

2007 Resolutions

+ Make lots of mistakes

+ Write, Shoot and Edit 1 short film each month

+ Acknowledge, accept and embrace fear and resistance directly

+ Read more fiction

+ Daily Exercise - Not if, but what

+ Daily Meditation

+ Look at more paintings

+ Listen

Happy New Year

A very eventful year has come to a close. I learned a lot this year and end the year a better man than I started it.
This past week has been a real joy. Christmas morning with the family, of course. Had the week off. Went to see some films (Volver +++++ Little Children ++++ Eragon phtwww) and out for meals with friends and family. Sold some more equipment and bought a new HD camera. Wrote the final twenty-five pages on a new script in the past three days. Had two very illuminating and encouraging meetings about an upcoming project. Even made it to the gym.
It's been a great week to close out a tough, but wonderful year.

I'm feeling rested and ready for all that 2007 has in store for us.

¡viva!
signore direttore

The Master Says 107

I run on the road, long before I dance under the lights.

Muhammad Ali

The Master Says 106

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall.

Che Guevara

A New Year's Resolution

This is who I want to be:

Me: I'm trying something new.
World: Aren't you scared?
Me: Yeah, ain't it great!

I want to fall on my ass and my face and learn to laugh about it.

I'm starting now by admitting that I'm scared.

Okay. The cat's out of the bag: I'm afraid.

Besitos,
Signore Direttore

The Master Says 105

I've been terrified every day of my life but that's never stopped me from doing everything I wanted to do.

Georgia O'Keefe

The Master Says 104

I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.

Pedro Almodovar

The Master Says103

Where have I come from? What am I doing here? What is it that I mean to achieve?

Konstantin Stanislavsky

Not Letting It Pass Me By

I have been a little anxious today as I always am around the holidays. I know I am not uniquely affected by the chaos, excitement, expectations and memories that come with Christmas. Each year I try to keep it more and more simple.

We had no last minute shopping to do. No party obligations. No extended family commitments.

I did some organizing - cleaned off my dresser, emptied some boxes of papers, put a piece of gear up for auction on eBay, cleaned up the spaghetti of cables and wires under the edit suite, wrapped a few gifts, watched football and took a nap.

I also put together the cutest little red tricycle. I did it this morning so as not to put it off until after the kids were in bed. I try to avoid that dad putting toys together until late on Christmas Eve cliche as much as possible. I realized that this little trike might be around for a while and that I'd only get to put it together once. I told myself not to let the moment pass me by. Everything shifted quite a bit after that. I was really doing what I was doing. It brought a moment of joy and peace to my day.

Merry Christmas,

nc

The Master Says 102

Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.

Jean Cocteau

The Master Says 101

It must be the colors
And the kids
That keep me alive
'Cause the music is boring me to death

Cat Power

The Master Says 100

Filmmakers should think less and use their imaginations more.

Alexander Mackendrick

The Master Says 099

Watch and listen.

Robert Altman

The Master Says 098

To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.

Marlon Brando

The Master Says 097

When I grow up, I still want to be a director.

Steven Spielberg

The Master Says 096

I like to write when I feel spiteful; it's like having a good sneeze.

D.H. Lawrence

The Master Says 095

The job is to ask questions - it always was - and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.

Arthur Miller

The Master Says 094

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

Martin Hiedegger

Five and Out

The time has come for me to end my five year career as an acting coach. Last night was the final class at the studio. I've decided to quit teaching in order to have more time and energy for other areas of my life. We went out with a month of very solid on-camera scene study. The past weeks have been very satisfying, allowing me to leave something which I've labored over and loved on a high note. The disappointment and surprise of the actor-students was humbling.
I thought of all the faces and personalities that have drifted through my studios over the past years as I cleaned out the storage closet and scrubbed the floor last night. I remembered the challenges and the laughs as well as the struggles and triumphs I witnessed and experienced over the years. I've grown as a person and as an artist as a result. I've gained some small measure of humility if only in the realization that I don't have to be all things to all people. Letting go of another hyphen in my occupation bio is a big step toward getting right-sized.
They say to teach is to learn a thing twice. My goal was never to be a better actor, but I do believe that all the things that make an actor better at his craft make him a better human being. I can say with confidence that I've done my best to show many the way toward making that a possiblilty in their lives. For everything that came to pass, both good and bad, it was my sincere effort at being present and truthful and that's always good enough. For that I am grateful.

Sincerely,
nc

Folk Wisdom 023

Don´t cry because it´s over, smile because it happened.

The Master Says 093

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.

Ingmar Bergman

The Master Says 092

There is no art in confusion.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Master Says 091

The hardest thing to learn is how to correct what's wrong without harming what's good.

Dede Allen

The Master Says 090

The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn't be in flashback.

Alain Resnais

The Master Says 089

A Little shoeshine boy never gets low down
But he's got the dirtiest job in town
Bendin' low at the peoples' feet
On the windy corner of the dirty street
Well, I asked him while he shined my shoes
How'd he keep from gettin' the blues
He grinned as he raised his little head
Popped a shoeshine rag and then he said

Get rhythm when you get the blues
Come on, get rhythm when you get the blues
A jumpy rhythm makes you feel so fine
It'll shake all the trouble from your worried mind
Get rhythm when you get the blues

Johnny Cash

The Master Says 088

Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied, ... That's why they can keep on working. I've been able to work for so long because I think next time, I'll make something good.

Akira Kurosawa

The Master Says 087

In theater, action is apt to be less a physical activity than a confrontation between characters, where the story progresses because of conflicts of personalities and verbal exchanges.
In film, what is happening now is likely to be less dramatically interesting than the action that may - or may not - be about to happen.

Alexander Mackendrick

Altman Interview

IT’S OKAY WITH ME

The Stop Smiling Interview with Robert Altman

By James Hughes

Midway through Robert Altman’s 1975 film Nashville, a bemused BBC reporter played by Geraldine Chaplin infiltrates the house party of Haven Hamilton, the crown jewel of Nashville’s music royalty. Regarding her majestic surroundings — a lush, tree-lined estate that looks more like a roadside stop from Wild Strawberries than the backwoods of Tennessee — Chaplin flatters her host by comparing the scene to a slice of Sweden’s premier auteur. “Bergman,” she cries. “Pure, unadulterated Bergman!” Taking one final glance at the locals — a honky-tonk group already tipsy on Jack Daniels — she revises her statement. “Of course the people are all wrong for Bergman, aren’t they?”

This small exchange, typically buried in a sound track dense with overlapping dialogue, encapsulates the essence of Robert Altman. His films have a European sensibility that echoes both the grandeur and the interior anguish of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini. But the characters Altman chooses to occupy these arenas are quintessentially American. Faithful to his ever expanding stable of actors (Shelly Duvall, Michael Murphy, Lily Tomlin and Elliott Gould among them) Altman explores the lives of real people living in the forgotten recesses of a country often misrepresented by an overexposure of the two coasts. For over 50 years, Altman has created a cinematic landscape that stems from the heartland and branches out to every corner of the map: from the hazy Southwestern sprawl of California Split and 3 Women, through the clutter of Texas (Brewster McCloud and Dr. T and the Women) and quaintness of Kansas City, all the way up the bustling eastern seaboard, where the fictional presidential candidate Jack Tanner shamelessly canvassed for votes in ’88.

Robert Altman was born in Kansas City in 1925. After serving overseas in World War II, he returned to the Midwest and worked on industrial films for the Calvin Co. of Kansas City, eventually landing in the director’s chair for television series as diverse as “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “Bonanza.” With the success of MASH in 1970, Altman was tossed the keys to Hollywood’s most coveted projects, but chose instead to champion more personal films. Despite his continuous critical acclaim, he remains in the distinguished company of Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese and King Vidor — all Best Director nominees shut out five times by the Academy. But Altman seems unaffected by the allure of awards, and even more so by the demands and labels of the press. As Philip Marlowe would mumble in Altman’s exquisite adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, “It’s okay with me.”

Fresh off a rebirth from Gosford Park in 2002, which catapulted him back into the public eye with the same force as The Player in 1991, Altman has recently seen some of his greatest unreleased works preserved on DVD, and he now embraces digital technology. His last two features — The Company and the just-wrapped A Prairie Home Companion — were shot on high-definition video. And, as Altman reveals from his well-equipped production office in Midtown Manhattan, he’s not surprised to see film become a thing of the past.

Stop Smiling: The film that you’ve just wrapped, A Prairie Home Companion, isn’t a documentary about the making of Garrison Keillor’s radio show, it’s a narrative that uses the show and its theater as a setting?

Robert Altman: Yes, it’s a drama about the demise of the radio show. The penultimate scene has Kevin Kline at the piano while the stage is being demolished.

SS: How was it working with Garrison Keillor?

RA: It was pretty good. It was tough on him — he’s been in charge for 30 years. This is the first time he’s done anything in which he is the content. And he’s always dealt in radio, so I had to put pictures up there. I have to give the audience something to look at. We could’ve shot the Keillor picture anywhere, but it was easier for all of us to shoot it in St. Paul, because that’s where it was based, and that stuff rubs off on you. It really rubs off on the people who live there and perform there. But we never left — we had two locations: a diner, which we shot in one night, and the rest of the time was all in the Fitzgerald Theater. We get a lot of cooperation in a city like St. Paul, because it’s a novelty to them, and they’re all very nice when you go to those small towns and small venues.

SS: Paul Thomas Anderson was brought on to be your back-up director. Did that work well?

RA: Yes. He was with me all the time. He’s a good friend of mine. I’m 80 years old. So they don’t insure me. On Gosford Park, which was the first time I did this, Stephen Frears was my stand-in. That’s all an insurance issue.

SS: How did you and P.T. Anderson meet?

RA: I’ve known Paul since he started, and he’s always been very generous about the origins of his work. Paul agreed to do it, which surprised and thrilled me. His girlfriend, Maya Rudolph, who was pregnant, was in the film as well. So that made things easier. It worked out well.

SS: There’s such a lack of regionalism in American entertainment today. You seem to be one of the few filmmakers who sets their films in smaller cities.

RA: I also try not to make all my films in Canada, and create that city that doesn’t exist anywhere. It’s dreadful what some filmmakers do. Most of my films I call arena films. I deal with a confined area — an arena — and I try to cover every aspect of it.

SS: You’ve had films set in larger cities like Los Angeles, but even then it’s treated almost like an alien environment.

RA: I’ve lived in New York for about 30 years, and I still meet people today who say, “Oh, you’re a Hollywood director.” That’s strange, because I’ve hardly ever made a film in that mold. I’ve never really been a New York director, either. That kind of mafia that runs New York, I never wanted to participate in that. As for Los Angeles, The Long Goodbye and California Split used that arena. Short Cuts was strictly L.A. I usually find that I don’t do road pictures; I need to have a cultural and geographical perimeter. Maybe that’s just the way I organize my thoughts, I need to contain them and contain my environment. Most of the time, it’s whatever interests me, whatever gets my attention at the time. It always ends up as the result of finding the right arena to do the film I’ve got in mind to do. The arena becomes a big part of it, because it fills the big part of it. I’ve done a lot pictures in small towns in the South. When you go to a unique area, I can do more with the stuff they have there. We try to use their culture, their colors, their music, their pride and prejudices.

SS: When the auteur theory came about in the mid-’60s, were you keeping an eye on how that movement was being shaped in the film journals overseas and then imported to the United States?

RA: I was focused on what I was doing and wanted to do. I was trying to make my own career and my own life’s work. Anything I felt helped in that area, I was interested in.

SS: Did the awakening of film writers and their duels in the press — Andrew Sarris battling Pauline Kael, for example — hold your attention at all?

RA: Pauline was a big help to me. She didn’t like a lot of my films. And when Pauline didn’t like my films, I didn’t like Pauline. When she did, I thought she was a genius. At times, I’d say, “What’s Kael going to think of this? What’s Judith Crist going to think of this?” The same is true today, because critics are the first press that you have to represent your work.

SS: So you took initial steps to guarantee that Kael would see your work early?

RA: Oh, yeah. She saw Nashville early. She jumped her deadline at The New Yorker, which helped cause a stir for the film. That was a controversy in itself. What she saw was the finished picture, although the story has it that what she saw was about three hours longer. There was some editing done on the picture since she saw it, but it was just tweaks. The critics were a force in the ’70s, but then the studio heads disappeared, so the filmmakers really were in charge. We could do pretty much what we wanted. I made Brewster McCloud at MGM — they couldn’t release it and they just dumped it, but the fact that it even got made is miraculous. Originally that script was terrible, and we reinvented it as we shot it. For me, the story has never been a concern. I like to literally save the idea, in a funny way. But at that time, I was being offered big, big movies, because it followed right after MASH. I said I didn’t want to make anything like that. I took a really low-budget project instead. I’ve done that all my life. If something works for you, you continue to do it. I did a bunch of pictures for 20th Century Fox when Alan Ladd was over there, but I set the budgets so low that they’d approve and I’d deliver the film. They would have no say in it, which is the kind of arrangement I liked.

SS: Was it your background in television and industrial films that kept you distanced from the theoretical side of filmmaking?

RA: I think it kept me more eclectic, in terms of venue and all that. I was always interested in shooting in places that I’d never been to before, and trying to use their assets. I find it hard to repeat myself, or consciously repeat myself. I can’t tell you how many times I was offered to do another MASH. I would always ask why. There was one, and that’s what I did. I despise the television show, because I think it was thematically the opposite of what the film was. For 12 years, it was about an Asian war. The enemy, no matter how you want to cut it or what platitudes you say, was always the guy with brown skin and narrow eyes.

SS: Were you constantly harassed during the reign of the show?

RA: I remember at my mother’s funeral, all of the ladies in the neighborhood in Kansas City baked some stuff. Afterward they caught me in the kitchen and said, “Oh, Mr. Altman. That MASH, we just love that.” I just said, “Oh, well. Thank you very much.” But they never saw what I did.

SS: When you were younger and watching films, did you keep track of directors and follow their releases?

RA: People have asked me throughout the years which directors have influenced me. I don’t know their names, because I was mostly influenced when I’d see a film and think, “Man, I want to be sure to never do anything like that.” So I never learned their names. It wasn’t a matter of copying or emulating somebody I admired. It was getting rid of a lot of stuff. I was impressed and affected by Bergman and Fellini and Kurosawa. My film Images was a big nod to Bergman, to Persona particularly. My whole sense of Kurosawa was light coming through trees, like in Rashomon. That film in particular was a favorite of mine. I liked a lot of the Italian films, some of the French. It went in circles — the British films were terrific for a while. There doesn’t seem to be room for everybody. Somebody comes in and occupies the art market, as I suppose it would be called, and then another group takes over.

SS: You once said, “The artist and the multitude are natural enemies.” How can you then explain working in so many popular mediums, like television, film, theater and opera?

RA: Opera cannot be considered a popular medium, and theater can hardly be, either. And most films can’t be. Television is still a popular medium. Movies are finished, aren’t they?

SS: You don’t just mean the steady decline of the box office?

RA: Just the general quality or character of the films being made. The marketing has always been to 14-year-old males. That’s one audience I’ve never had, or ever will have. Maybe it’s generational, maybe it’s just all past me and I don’t know it. But I just don’t see any films — or filmmakers, for that matter — coming along that interest me. I find the style of the films so silly. I’m surprised filmmakers can get away with all this. The corniness of most of these things — anyone who can even do it astonishes me.

SS: So it isn’t as much apathy from the audiences, it’s the fault of the filmmakers themselves?

RA: Well, no, the filmmakers are pushing themselves. It’s what they can get done, and now it’s all marketing. It went from the studio bosses ordering certain kinds of films to be made. Then the writers and filmmakers took over in the ’70s. The studio bosses disappeared. Then in the ’80s the agents started taking over. That was okay for a while. Then the marketing and advertising people took over, and now I don’t know who’s calling the shots. I don’t know any of the people who run the studios anymore. It’s pointless. What would I have to say to them anyway? We’re not in the same business. There’s no point in even getting in the same room together.

SS: Are you happy to reach an audience through whatever medium you can?

RA: When you go into opera and theater, you know you’re going into a limited stage, but it’s also a specialized stage. I don’t have to worry about the teenage boys anymore. But now we have a general level of intelligence in America that is considerably lower than it was 30 years ago. We’ve been dumbed down to a point where maybe some positive things will come around again, but I don’t even understand what they market as films these days. How do they do it? As I say, it’s probably me. I’m probably so out of touch with what’s going on.

SS: If there were a more thriving creative community in America, would film be the medium you would want to reach it through?

RA: Any kind of theater. Film is videotape now. There’s no need to use film anymore. You can use film to shoot your original material, and that film can be destroyed right after that, because it’s transferred to digital. At the end, when the digital is all dealt with, it’s put back to film. But that’s not the original film. The whole point of having to use film is because of the equipment that exists, and the egos of most of the artists, the cinematographers. If you took the top 10 cinematographers and I called them up, they’d say, “I’d love to work with you.” Then I’d say I wanted to shoot in high-def and they’d all say, “Oh, I don’t do that.” Well, why don’t they do that? It’s because they’ve made a big reputation by their manipulation of film. But film is just a medium. The picture that you see and the picture I see — how it gets from my mind to you, it’s of no consequence. It shouldn’t even be in the terms of discussion. I couldn’t have shot the Keillor picture, or The Company — the last two films I’ve made — on anything other than high-def. We shot Tanner on Tanner on regular video. We didn’t even get into high-def. The quality of the high-def can’t be beat. We were in this theater in St. Paul the whole time, and if you walked in there, you would not know that there was a motion picture going on, because you wouldn’t see any lights. You’d see a lot of cameras and cranes, but you wouldn’t see any lights.

SS: You’ve been burned more than anyone else by the effects of film deterioration — McCabe & Mrs. Miller being the obvious example. At the time you were making that film, it would’ve no doubt horrified you to think that, just a short time later, the original camera negative would be in such jeopardy.

RA: I was just on the edge of it. All of my films had been saved. There was a point when most of my films were not saved and couldn’t be, primarily because nobody knew who owned the negatives. It was only recently — because of Martin Scorsese and his film preservation efforts, along with a few things connected with some universities — where we went back and saved the films. They then go right onto video. But otherwise, if it hadn’t been for those efforts, you couldn’t see more than 10 of my films.

SS: As a format, DVD seems to be a particular lifesaver for you. Last year was a great year, in terms of previously unavailable films resurfacing. We saw Tanner ’88, Secret Honor, California Split and 3 Women.

RA: Oh, I know. And a lot of them weren’t out because of music clearances, or certain copyright problems. We had to make adjustments. The cost of the music track on California Split was so high that Columbia just couldn’t put it into video or DVD. That kept it out of circulation for years. Finally, Elliott Gould went in to find out why they weren’t releasing it. When they told him it was because of the music, he said, “Isn’t there something we can do about that?” So I made some cuts and took a couple of songs out. We got it into what they considered a reasonable budget. The picture wasn’t hurt by it. And that’s out now. It doesn’t make any difference, the quality of these things. It’s as good as anyone sees them. Most people see every film on a tiny screen. For me to go sit in a nice projection room and look at a screen where I get to move my head to see the full picture, that almost doesn’t exist anymore.

SS: Or it exists on a level where you almost don’t want to participate?

RA: Well, you just don’t have the opportunity that often. On Prairie Home Companion, we ran tests right off the bat. We took the tests down to a big art center in Minneapolis and ran the footage on an enormous screen. It’s breathtaking. But it’s hardly a big issue, because few people will see it under those circumstances. It’s a shame — although television is getting bigger and better, and screens are now a decent size. But you can’t just do a beautiful shot for the sake of making a beautiful shot. It no longer can really overwhelm.

SS: You certainly seized that opportunity when you had the chance. For example, on a film like The Long Goodbye, with its post-flashing of the negative, which led to stellar results.

RA: The flashing was a different kind of conceit. We were trying to not make Los Angeles look so pretty. We used a fog filter to destroy the image. Now the thing is to make everything as sharp as possible. But times change, tastes change. Eventually, people will see enough of that and want to start distressing the image. Already, the big problem is that it’s too sharp on too many plains. But I don’t think I would go back to film. Especially in the two years it took between The Company and this film, the technology has jumped 200 percent. Cameras don’t have to be the same size they used to be. They can just take a different card and put it in existing equipment and that upgrades it. When they get the equipment packaged down to the size of a Kodak box, the possibilities will really open.

SS: Would you steer younger filmmakers toward digital technology and encourage them to keep their eyes on the developments of high-definition video?

RA: Absolutely. Most of them do it, because it’s cheaper. But mainly they’re misinformed about film, and misinformed by their cinematographers, because these guys have made their reputation with film — they don’t want to just suddenly throw that out. But that’s always been the way. I remember when television started, and it was the first time Russell Metty and some of the other big cinematographers had to go over and do television. Oh, man, that was tough for them. “What do you mean, do a show in five days?” they’d say. It was degrading.

SS: What held your interest when you were younger, growing up in Kansas City? Were you tapped into the jazz scene?

RA: Yes, I was. I lived in Kansas City until I was 18 years old, then I went on to the Second World War. I came back and worked there for a little while. Early on, jazz was a big influence on me. We had a black maid who worked in our household. She helped take care of me. I remember she sat me down on a hassock in the living room and said, “Now, Bobby. You sit down here and you listen to this, because this is the best music there ever will be.” It was Duke Ellington’s “Solitude.” It was the first time I became aware of it, and the world that surrounded the music.

SS: How was your reception when you went back to your hometown to make the film Kansas City?

RA: They weren’t very impressed. Jesus never made it in his hometown, either, you know? I don’t know what that is. But after I’m dead and gone, they’ll laud me, all the people who don’t know me and wouldn’t have liked what I did. Kansas City, they hated that. I went back there and made a black picture and they didn’t approve.

SS: Was the starting point for the film an attempt to explore the jazz world?

RA: It was the time period, and the music — the pre-bebop time period. I was there then, and I used to go down to clubs when I was 14. They would sit me up in the balcony, or find some place for me. I had a couple friends, and we’d spend hours and hours in those places. It was a milieu we weren’t exposed to in any other way. But those musicians played at our high school dances and our proms and all that. We didn’t know their names, but we probably had big-name jazz players right in front of us.

SS: When you were discovering movies and jazz, did you have to go to those venues surreptitiously?

RA: The general group of people I went to school with didn’t do those types of things. A few of us would take off and ride the streetcar downtown and go to those joints, which were all in the same area. My friends and I became known, and these musicians were very generous and would allow us in.

SS: You’ve had that approach as well with your films, allowing people to participate and watch dailies with you.

RA: That was in the old days. We don’t do that anymore. Dailies don’t exist anymore now that we shoot high-def video. We shoot so much footage now that it would take too long to see it. It’s the thing I miss the most.

SS: When you assemble a large cast, as you so often do, do you rely heavily on a casting director?

RA: I never work with casting directors. There’s a person I use in New York now. There have been times when I’ve used them, but primarily I put the cast together. Rarely have I read people for roles. I have people in mind, and then we rewrite their part to fit that particular actor.

SS: Do your choices stem from personal connections to people?

RA: Yeah, or people I see. I just figure someone will be good for a particular part, or a particular kind of movie. Or some will get a movie made for you, so I talk myself into liking them. But in almost all cases they’ve enjoyed the experiences — I’ve got no actor complaints.

SS: Because of the freedom you give them?

RA: I don’t know. Maybe it’s just my good judgment. There can’t be a lot of freedom, because they come onto the set and I say, “We’re shooting this scene, where do you stand? Where do you sit?” It’s organized. But they are collaborators, and that’s what they became actors to do in the first place. Even if they realize that they’re stuck, they realize that everybody else is stuck, too. They’ll do their best to help everybody climb out of that hole.

SS: You produced a few films for other filmmakers, and certainly your former production company, Lion’s Gate, was an attempt to broaden the reach of other filmmakers. Was producing too much of a departure for you?

RA: I didn’t want to force my artistic views on anybody else. If I’m going to do that, why have them there? And these were their projects. It doesn’t give me much gratification. There was a time where I was trying to be a mogul, I guess. It was no fun. The only time I ever fired an actor was for Robert Benton, who I produced a picture for called The Late Show. I had to step in and do it, because he wouldn’t do it. Bob said, “I have an actor I need to get rid of.” Suddenly I realized that’s what my job was. I’ve never done that in my own films. There were times when I should have, but I just didn’t. I always made the films out of the material I gathered together. I figured that’s the DNA of the film, so I would stick with it.

SS: For all the actors you’ve worked with on a regular basis, is it a painful process when one particular actor falls out of favor, or if there’s simply never another role that comes along that suits them?

RA: There’s a lot of pain connected to it, because actors by nature think they can do anything. And they’re right. But then everything else has to change. But I’ve found that I use people over and over again. If I see someone in a picture and I like their work, I go right to them.

SS: What about when you’re not able to go back to certain names and certain friends — if you can’t quite find that right match for them?

RA: I don’t know that that’s happened. Lily Tomlin, I hadn’t worked with before this last picture for a long time. Everybody else on the Prairie Home Companion picture was new to me. There were several people there that I’d like to work with again, and probably will. The question is, how much longer am I going to be able to work? Eventually we give up the ghost.

SS: Retirement not being an option?

RA: No, retirement not being an option. But stopping working being a reality, probably.

The Master Says 087

There is a popular misconception that film-makers have to look to Hollywood to be commercially successful but this is how we have been conditioned.

Mike Leigh

The Master Says 086

It's always the cast. As you pull a layer off, you realize they are really courageous, really gutsy...I admire them for what they bring to me (and) to the audience.

Robert Altman

The Master Says 085

There's no point in making a movie just to be making a movie.

Warren Beatty

A Master Dies

"Retirement? You're talking about death, right?"
Robert Altman


His obit from Variety:

Helmer Robert Altman dies
Cause of death not disclosed
By ASSOCIATED PRESS

Robert Altman, the caustic and irreverent satirist behind "M-A-S-H," "Nashville" and "The Player" who made a career out of bucking Hollywood management and story conventions, died at a Los Angeles Hospital, his Sandcastle 5 Productions Company said Tuesday. He was 81.

The director died Monday night, Joshua Astrachan, a producer at Altman's Sandcastle 5 Productions in New York City, told The Associated Press.

The cause of death wasn't disclosed. A news release was expected later in the day, Astrachan said.

A five-time Academy Award nominee for best director, most recently for 2001's "Gosford Park," he finally won a lifetime achievement Oscar in 2006.

"No other filmmaker has gotten a better shake than I have," Altman said while accepting the award. "I'm very fortunate in my career. I've never had to direct a film I didn't choose or develop. My love for filmmaking has given me an entree to the world and to the human condition."

Altman had one of the most distinctive styles among modern filmmakers. He often employed huge ensemble casts, encouraged improvisation and overlapping dialogue and filmed scenes in long tracking shots that would flit from character to character.

Perpetually in and out of favor with audiences and critics, Altman worked ceaselessly since his anti-war black comedy "M-A-S-H" established his reputation in 1970, but he would go for years at a time directing obscure movies before roaring back with a hit.

After a string of commercial duds including "The Gingerbread Man" in 1998, "Cookie's Fortune" in 1999 and "Dr. T & the Women" in 2000, Altman took his all-American cynicism to Britain for 2001's "Gosford Park."

A combination murder-mystery and class-war satire set among snobbish socialites and their servants on an English estate in the 1930s, "Gosford Park" was Altman's biggest box-office success since "M-A-S-H."

Besides best-director, "Gosford Park" earned six other Oscar nominations, including best picture and best supporting actress for both Helen Mirren and Maggie Smith. It won the original-screenplay Oscar, and Altman took the best-director prize at the Golden Globes for "Gosford Park."

Altman's other best-director Oscar nominations came for "M-A-S-H," the country-music saga "Nashville" from 1975, the movie-business satire "The Player" from 1992 and the ensemble character study "Short Cuts" from 1993. He also earned a best-picture nomination as producer of "Nashville."

No director ever got more best-director nominations without winning a regular Oscar, though four other men — Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Clarence Brown and King Vidor — tied with Altman at five.

In May, Altman brought out "A Prairie Home Companion," with Garrison Keillor starring as the announcer of a folksy musical show — with the same name as Keillor's own long-running show — about to be shut down by new owners. Among those in the cast were Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Kevin Kline, Woody Harrelson and Tommy Lee Jones.

"This film is about death," Altman said at a May 3 news conference in St. Paul, Minn., also attended by Keillor and many of the movie's stars.

He often took on Hollywood genres with a revisionist's eye, de-romanticizing the Western hero in 1971's "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" and 1976's "Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson," the film-noir gumshoe in 1973's "The Long Goodbye" and outlaw gangsters in "Thieves Like Us."

"M-A-S-H" was Altman's first big success after years of directing television, commercials, industrial films and generally unremarkable feature films. The film starring Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould was set during the Korean War but was Altman's thinly veiled attack on U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

"That was my intention entirely. If you look at that film, there's no mention of what war it is," Altman said in an Associated Press interview in 2001, adding that the studio made him put a disclaimer at the beginning to identify the setting as Korea.

"Our mandate was bad taste. If anybody had a joke in the worst taste, it had a better chance of getting into the film, because nothing was in worse taste than that war itself," Altman said.

The film spawned the long-running TV sitcom starring Alan Alda, a show Altman would refer to with distaste as "that series." Unlike the social message of the film, the series was prompted by greed, Altman said.

"They made millions and millions of dollars by bringing an Asian war into Americans' homes every Sunday night," Altman said in 2001. "I thought that was the worst taste."

Altman never minced words about reproaching Hollywood. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he said Hollywood served as a source of inspiration for the terrorists by making violent action movies that amounted to training films for such attacks.

"Nobody would have thought to commit an atrocity like that unless they'd seen it in a movie," Altman said.

Altman was written off repeatedly by the Hollywood establishment, and his reputation for arrogance and hard drinking — a habit he eventually gave up — hindered his efforts to raise money for his idiosyncratic films.

While critical of studio executives, Altman held actors in the highest esteem. He joked that on "Gosford Park," he was there mainly to turn the lights on and off for the performers.

The respect was mutual. Top-name actors would clamor for even bit parts in his films. Altman generally worked on shoestring budgets, yet he continually landed marquee performers who signed on for a fraction of their normal salaries.

After the mid-1970s, the quality of Altman's films became increasingly erratic. His 1980 musical "Popeye," with Robin Williams, was trashed by critics, and Altman took some time off from film.

He directed the Broadway production of "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean," following it with a movie adaptation in 1982. Altman went back and forth from TV to theatrical films over the next decade, but even when his films earned critical praise, such as 1990's "Vincent & Theo," they remained largely unseen.

"The Player" and "Short Cuts" re-established Altman's reputation and commercial viability. But other 1990s films — including his fashion-industry farce "Ready to Wear" and "Kansas City," his reverie on the 1930s jazz and gangster scene of his hometown — fell flat.

Born Feb. 20, 1925, Altman hung out in his teen years at the jazz clubs of Kansas City, Mo., where his father was an insurance salesman.

Altman was a bomber pilot in World War II and studied engineering at the University of Missouri in Columbia before taking a job making industrial films in Kansas City. He moved into feature films with "The Delinquents" in 1957, then worked largely in television through the mid 1960s, directing episodes of such series as "Bonanza" and "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."

Altman and his wife, Kathryn, had two sons, Robert and Matthew, and he had a daughter, Christine, and two other sons, Michael and Stephen, from two previous marriages.

When he received his honorary Oscar in 2006, Altman revealed he had a heart transplant a decade earlier.

"I didn't make a big secret out of it, but I thought nobody would hire me again," he said after the ceremony. "You know, there's such a stigma about heart transplants, and there's a lot of us out there."

Folk WIsdom 022

Seeking strength from others prevents us from finding our own.

The Master Says 084

It's easy to fool the eye but it's hard to fool the heart.

Al Pacino

The Master Says 083

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.

William Goldman

The Master Says 082

We're always bemoaning the fact that there are great directors around who haven't made a decent film in 20 years, or writers who have ran out of stuff, but I don't think it's that so much as they simply lose their ear - or maybe their eye - because they haven't been looking and listening.
What I always meant by that was that I do believe that a lot of directors, and writers, and sometimes producers just lose their edge because they haven't seen anybody or talked to anybody or been with anybody who isn't a kind of replica of themselves for a long period of time. You know, we're voyeurs and eavesdroppers, and if everyone is voyeuring and eavesdropping on what's being said at Spago, you're not going to get a lot of really good material.

Buck Henry

The Master Says 081

The only safe thing is to take a chance.

Mike Nichols

The Master Says 080

Hollywood is the only industry, even taking in soup companies, which does not have laboratories for the purpose of experimentation.

Orson Welles

The Master Says 079

An actor is never so great as when he reminds you of an animal - falling like a cat, lying like a dog, moving like a fox.

Francois Truffaut

The Master Says 078

Wisdom and love have nothing to do with each other. Wisdom is staying alive, survival. You’re wise if you don’t stick your finger in the light plug.
Love -- you’ll stick your finger in anything.

Robert Altman

The Science of Saturday Night

Many years ago I received a voice mail on a Saturday night from a woman I was dating. In her coldly sensual wit she droned, "Hey it's _____. Saturday night, big Saturday night." So forever since, that message echoes in my brain anytime something is happening on Saturday night and, perhaps equally when absolutely nothing is happening.
Last night was a Big Saturday Night. We were invited to the wrap party for Gus Van Sant's film, Paranoid Park. The type of event that I always am pleased to have the opportunity to attend, yet always feel a great deal of anxiety about. The trepidation is due in part to an egotistical conceit that being part of the crowd rather than one of the kingpins is something shamefully mundane. The fact is that I admire Gus Van Sant tremendously. He is an incredibly prolific visionary that makes wonderful films. Whenever I've been in his presence he treats people very graciously. Who am I to think I merit more than an invite to such a celebration? I didn't last night. It was a nice feeling to be one in the crowd, free from envy and thwarted entitlement. In fact I spoke to a couple people about my recent filmmaking with earnest humility. There was no need to assert my accomplishments, I was simply reporting on some facts of my own life. I really appreciate the ability to feel comfortable with who I am. It's been a long time coming after a lifetime of the anguish of feeling the need to be more than I am. On a less solipsistic note, when we were leaving we noticed some of the teen girls in the cast in a room by themselves. They weren't talking. They were logged onto myspace.

After the party we went to see The Science of Sleep. What a joyful treat that was! At more than one point I found myself attempting to discern what was dream and what was fictive reality. I was able to resist my left brain impulses and enjoy the film's illogic. I love Gael Garcia Bernal. For one, he's a very wonderful actor that skillfully fills every moment without chewing the scenery. Another thing I find familiar and attractive about him is that he's a Chilango. He speaks English with the accent and posseses the mirthful ennui particular to my wonderful friends in Mexico City. I love the ordinary look and feel of Michel Gondry's films. His work is wonderfully cinematic without any slick baggage. In a certain sense they're anti-films. The surrealism of his films is all the more powerful because of it. Charlotte Gainsbourg embodies that sensibility well, she's an anti-movie star. She seems to wear no makeup nor comb her hair, she is at once self-effacing, strong and helpless. How utterly human, yet on a scale grand enough to allow us to get really close to her. Go see this picture in a theater. For sure.