The Master Says 268

Of this I am firmly convinced, that cinema today should be tied to the truth rather than to logic. And the truth of our daily lives is neither mechanical, conventional nor artificial, as stories generally are, and if films are made that way, they will show it.

Michelangelo Antonioni

Chekhov's Six Principles of a Good Story

1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature
2. Objectivity
3. Truthfulness
4. Brevity
5. Originality
6. Compassion

Billy Wilder's Ten Tips for Screenwriters

1. The audience is fickle.
2. Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.
3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
4. Know where you’re going.
5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees.
Add to what they’re seeing.
9. The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then—that’s it. Don’t hang around.

Philip K. Dick Reading List

The following are the most productive sources for Sci-Fi ideas according to Philip K. Dick:

Psychology journals
The works of CG Jung
Zen Buddhist writings
Taoist writings
Historical and medieval works (especially thos dealing with crafts, such as glassblowing)
Greek philosophy
Roman literature of every sort
Persian religious texts
Renaissance studies on the theory of art
German dramatic writings of the Romantic period

The Master Says 268

Many people, I guess, want to know exactly what it is they're supposed to think ... Well, my message is that I am not going to do their work for them.

Robert Altman

oo7 Review | Time Is On My Side

We shot our second round of Made Crooked epilogue scenes yesterday. We were on the front lawn of Reed College with Tara P. and Alex Cassidy. The younger Cassidy brother played Tara's boyfriend. Not only was Alex great to work with, it felt really good to have a witness to our story. I can't say where it came from, but I just knew that Tara had to have a boyfriend in her interview scenes. And it was perfect.
It was cold yesterday. And that's coming from a guy that doesn't get cold easily. Once we wrapped all the cold that had worked its way up from the cold and wet ground through my Vibram and Goretex boots and wool socks suddenly came into full focus in my upper legs. Tara was shaking between takes, but dropped it as soon as we rolled. I really like working with her. I suggest something to her and she instantly and easily makes it her own. My job becomes very simple. I decide if we should do it again with but the slightest of adjustments or move on. It's easy to tell that she's working from a special place because if she says guest house instead of guest room and you correct her, she's like, Oh, did I say that? Which tells me she's not watching herself, she's just kind of entering another little world. The adjustment I need to make to my directing with actors like her is to ask, are you aware you said guest house? rather than offering a reason why she should not say guest house.
Revisiting and retelling the story of Made Crooked is a wonderful thing. It's been such a long road that it's easy to forget its wonder. Sitting down to a hot bowl of pho after the shoot I said as much to Jordan. His reply: Of course it is. Why else would I be standing out in the cold that long? I'm glad he's committed because I booked our tickets for NYC to shoot Joey's bit in early February where we'll be shooting exteriors in Central Park.
So yesterday's shoot was our last bit of filmmaking for the year. It was a very busy and full year in that regard. Looking back at January and the subsequent months of oo7, I feel as if I'm in a very different place as a filmmaker. I wouldn't change a thing yet I don't think I would approach much of anything as I did this last year. Which is a very good feeling. No regrets combined with a confident sense of benefiting from my experiences.
I was able to apply a valuable lesson yesterday: Move faster while giving myself more time. In other words, I knew we could do what we had to do in a couple of hours but I didn't tell anyone that. Instead, I had everyone for the full day. So when one of the dogs ran out of the Cassidy's when picking Alex up, it was no big deal to take the time to get him back. Tara and Alex had a chance to get to know each other while Jordan and I agreed on the best spot out of the places I'd scouted. Once we were where we needed to be in terms of the the camera and orienting the actors, we ran with it, stopping only for a bit of brief rain that we didn't have to suffer because we had plenty of time.
This may sound overly simple, but one of the things I've come to really hate as a director is the feeling that I'm always fighting the clock. All things unexpected are perceived as threats rather than opportunities or simply life. I don't want actors paying attention to the time, but if I'm feeling its pressure, they are likely to feel it as well. Nor do I want to move on, or be pressured to move on, if I'm not getting what I need from a scene. And I most certainly don't want to ignore the bounty of happy accidents. I don't know if this is the ultimate answer but it's a solution worth further review.
I've got a couple of Master Says' up my sleeve for the next couple of days, but this is likely my last dispatch of the year. So Happy New Year to all -- may you bring this last year to a joyful close and enter the new year with open hearts and minds.

xo,
Signore Direttore

Light and Shadow 013 - David

The Master Says 267

I was so moved by the way he (Raymond Carver) told stories, what he told and what he didn't tell and how he made a story out of the slightest incident. I was just amazed by it and thought this is what we should do more of in film.

Robert Altman

The Master Says 266

If you're a certain kind of filmmaker, everything is personal, whether a movie is about yourself or not. But I think, for the most part, people who write about film have a very limited idea what personal expression is and how it can manifest itself. As a result you often find directors being encouraged to make "personal films" when they would probably grow faster and go further if they began to look outside of themselves. That was the real turning point for me: I wasn't interested in making films about me anymore, and my take on things. I thought, "I've got to get out of the house!" And I've had more fun and I think the work is better since that occurred to me.

Steven Soderbergh

i miei dieci di oo7

1. Michael Clayton
2. Control
3. No Country For Old Men
4. Lars and the Real Girl
5. Into the Wild
6. There Will Be Blood
7. Cathedral Park
8. The Bourne Ultimatum
9. Eastern Promises
10. Superbad



Have yet to see: The Lives of Others, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, 4 Months3 Weeks2 Days, Lust,Caution, Persepolis, Atonement, Paranoid Park

The Master Says 265

I never had a plan. I don't how you can plan for it. God knows what the next thing will be.

Tim Roth

Better Directing

With Jordan's encouragement, I've tried to let go of helping as much, or at all even, with the lights and the camera on set. The idea being to let things settle and flow during set-ups and in between takes. Doing nothing is okay. Getting quiet is very important. It's helping. I focus better. I have more stamina in terms of concentration and inventiveness. I'm not quite there yet but I can see how it's opening up the possibility to ask actors for more, and much like the Chandler quote below, get pulled by our collective momentum instead of pushing it.
Each time I get on set lately, I've felt it building. Rather than scolding myself for not having pushed myself to push for more from the actors, I've had faith that I'm learning a new way to ask for more and that I don't have it just yet. It will come with patience. I'm sure of it.

I hope everyone out there has a Merry Christmas. I'm going to take a break from ye olde blogge until after the holiday.

Buon Natale,
Signore Direttore

Groundeded

For most of my moving toward long life, I've made decisions and plans in a decidedly reactive and whimsical manner. New York City, you say? You know I think I'll move there, always wanted to; why not? And so I sub-rent my Portland apartment still furnished with my stuff, park my 67 Wildcat convertible in a friend's driveway under a tarp, send two boxes of stuff via UPS, buy a plane ticket, pack two suitcases and move to New York City with all of three hundred dollars and a credit card with a $600 limit. Six months later I'm making twenty grand a month doing some pretty interesting stuff with some pretty interesting people.
And so it goes in my life. I landed back in Portland with two kids and a wife and opened an acting studio. We were two years too late or two years too premature in terms of our readiness for a cross-country move, having overstayed our welcome in the big city. Our thinking was it would be better to struggle here than there for two years.
So even with wife and kids, I've still been flying by the seat of my pants. All along I've been concocting moves to Mexico, Scotland, Senegal, Klickitat Washington, South Dakota, et cetera. I've even considered a never-ending roaming of campgrounds throughout North America according to the seasons and chance. I've fantasized about earning a living doing any number of things. Things practical, mundane, humble, grandiose, industrious, wanton and so forth. We've had more children and they've all grown to the point of arousing my awareness to acute acknowledgment that it's not all about me anymore. So I pluck away at my dream of making movies and ignore the beck and call of evermore romantic and impetuous adventures. You could say that my family grounds me, geographically foremost and in staying put I am not so distracted as to ignore my emotional, psychological and spiritual roots. You could also say that I'm a bit worn down by the sturm and drang of my thrill-seeking ways and I don't feel as if I have too many more tricks up my sleeve.
Yet I still do not have a plan. I concoct plans for just about everything. But I don't have a plan that has been carefully considered and pursued with diligence, right action and ingenuity. I am a not so lonely reed blowing in the wind, lacking the discipline and courage to take honest stock of where I am and where I would like to end up. I keep it vague. I want to keep whistling in the dark. I want to envy David for being in grad school and Jonny for his cozy house and Richard for his law degree and Din for his business and The D's for their centeredness. But I don't want to work on becoming a theater actor in Houston and I'm not sure I want to give up my investment property for a cozy house and I don't want to be a lawyer or own my own business to the exclusion of having time for my family andmaking movies. As for The D's, I know they have their share of struggles to stay grounded, too. All things honestly considered, I just want to be me.
Seems like I'm gearing up for a new year. I've learned and grown a lot this year. Life is good. I want it to be better. And it will be with more focus on diligence, right action and ingenuity and less on envy, taking comfort and analysis paralysis. Alas, I have a lot to be grateful for and I'm more and more serenely aware that I'm right where I'm supposed to be.

Simply Human,
Signore Direttore

Mudged

A few months back we ditched cable. No more Saturday morning cartoon bonanzas for our children. Aside from the initial tantrums that gave way to grumbling before entirely dissipating, the benefits have been profound. One is that neither of our older children has been bombarding us with dozens of demands of branded plastic contraptions for Christmas this year because they saw it on a commercial. Another is they aren't fighting over shows and turns and so forth. Because I've largely conceded Netflix to children's shows, I've been taking what I can get off of the DVD shelf at the public library.
Yesterday I grabbed The Mudge Boy. Not a title that beckons, but some of my friends in NY worked on it and I remembered that alone. I remember one friend that had worked on it recommended I meet Tommy Guiry for Original Glory. Then when I sat down to watch it last night I saw that Emile Hirsch was in it. Funny that back in 2003 Guiry was the future "star" of that cast. Both performances were very good. Too effective in some ways, at least for my discomfort with reckless homosexuality and the tensions leading up to it. I'm not a fan of watching male-male sex. I accept it when it's romantic. When it's a result of wanton lonely lust, serving as some sort of substitute for hetero desires and intimacy, like Deliverance, prison stuff and especially abused adolescents, I get really, really uncomfortable.
And this entire film was filled with that tension. With no transcendence, no hope, nothing. Just plain cruelty and pain and suffering. There wasn't even any humor. If there's one thing that I know firsthand about being human is that no matter how awful things are, we find a way to distract ourselves, usually through humor. This was just grim.
And to make matters worse, the ugliest bits were sanitized in such a way that rang false and irresponsible. The kid that gets raped is wearing his dead mother's wedding gown. That alone is enough to let you know how depraved things are in The Mudge Boy. The rapist had spoken a lot about how well-endowed he was earlier in the film. One would think that a fourteen year old would bleed when sodomized no matter the size of his rapist. The kid's dad walks in right after it's over. The kid has to ask for help to get the wedding dress off. I'm thinking the dad is going to see some evidence of the rape on the wedding dress. Nope, it's totally pristine and the kid walks away as if nothing has happened to him physically. It would have been almost impossible for the kid to not have been injured and in a lot of physical pain after such an experience.
I checked Imdb to see if the writer-director got a career going from his Mudge Boy debut. Not so far. It was a very competent film both technically and artistically. And it received very favorable reviews for its "gutsy portrayal of rural life".
All I know is, I felt awful after seeing this film.

Left Cold,
Signore Direttore

The Master Says 264

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.

Raymond Chandler

Woodshedding

We did some filming last night, a series of interviews to help Made Crooked come together. For a long time I've felt defensive and ashamed to have not finished that film yet. I mean, come on, you shoot a film in three days and it takes you going on two years to finish it. I think there's a lesson there. More than one. As time goes on I am starting to feel grateful to have let so much time pass. It isn't easy making a feature length film. Especially when your budget is less than five thousand dollars. Furthermore it's a long time to hold an audience's attention. I'm the kind of insecure perfectionist/idealist that won't ask you to come see something unless I believe in it. Taking our time with this has helped me support its strengths and let go of the pain of its weaknesses. I remain committed to buttressing its shortcomings and the time has allowed my experience with telling stories and this story in particular to develop. You know another thing that came to me just recently is that there are very few movies that I could watch more that a few times a year. I've seen Made Crooked a lot and letting a couple of months pass between viewings has been healthy.
So last night we shot David doing Pilates while reflecting and commenting on what happened nearly two years ago. Some of the compositions were stunning. I counted on David to come up with some interesting stuff and he did. For other things I fed him lines which he repeated or put into his own words. He said a couple of things that were outrageous. I love working the way we did last night. It was quiet in Studio Adrienne, we had the place to ourselves thanks to Adrienne Silviera's generosity. There was lots of space to move around and an adjacent room to stage our gear. I had a chair and a big HD monitor. Jordan and Brian handled all the gear. We teased each other relentlessly in a nonsensical manner as we always seem to do, creating a spirit that establishes that no one is allowed to take himself too seriously. When it comes to the work, Jordan and I almost don't need to talk that much about what we're shooting anymore. It just comes together most of the time. If he's going in a direction I don't like, I just tell him, No, come back over here, and that's that. I don't have to battle his ego or have a discussion about aesthetics. If he feels really strongly about something he tells me. I guess it's called trust.
I observed some things about myself last night -- some new things and some affirmations. One, I like to work small - simple set-ups and a tiny crew. Two, I don't like to work for very long at night - four to six hours tops. Three, I like to keep it moving. Four, since I've quit teaching acting I'm less and less interested in coaching actors. You bring your skills and I'll bring mine. If you lack skills or are having a rough time I don't worry about it. I'm there to work with you and I want the best we can do together, but there's a line that I'm less and less inclined to cross. Best of all, how good or bad you are has no reflection on my ego. I'm not going to sell you out or point fingers at you, nor am I going to take all the credit for your good work. What I'm doing is not Hollywood, it isn't even Indie. It's just electronic folk art. We're just woodshedding brothers and sisters, like bluegrass musicians coming together to work out a new tune on their guitars, banjos, fiddles and mandolins.
So bring your instruments and lets make us some movies!

Channeling the High Lonesome Spirit,
Signore Direttore

The Master Says 263

You can't give your photograph soul with technique. I want my photos to be fresh and urgent. A good photograph should be a call to arms. It should say, 'Fucking now. The time is ripe. Come on.'

Terry Richardson

Revisting Wes Anderson

My wife has a job in Bangkok next month, a photo shoot for a Japanese company that wants to riff or perhaps rip off The Darjeeling Limited. She needs to go see it soon. This coincides with my recent fascination with Armond White, who loves the film. I reread his review with a mind to seeing the film with a different perspective.
I don't think I can do it. My previously noted opinions stand. White praises Anderson's emotional honesty. To me, every actor seems to be holding his breath until "cut" is called. I don't see anything real being expressed. Emotion is certainly represented. White states, "... it returns common emotional power to today’s fragmented, disingenuous popular culture." I could easily rework that sentence as follows: ... it rejects common emotional power in favor of today's fragmented, disingenuous popular culture. Everything about Anderson's films is mannered -- the acting, the camera work, the music, the art direction, the writing. He merely reiterates and stylizes the luxury icons of the 70s and 80s - Mercedes, Porsche, Louis Vuitton, Cazal, Sulka, et cetera.
White also defends Anderson's idiosyncratic style as being an antidote to the "mass hypnosis of self-reflexive trash like Superbad". In defense of Superbad, it doesn't take itself seriously, present any stylistic stamp nor call itself cinema -- it's popcorn and laughs. I don't need an antidote for popcorn and laughs. I need a remedy for Anderson's relentless and deliberate artifice overelaborated in its delivery and stilted in every way from beginning to end. Were it the least bit ironic instead of pleading some deeply affected ennui I might find his work tolerable.
For irony to come across it would require that the full significance of any of Anderson's characters' words or actions are clear to the audience but unknown to the character, but the dead-pan tics of his actors betray a self-consciousness so pronounced that they appear to be depending on the significance of what they're saying for the very breath that they're holding during every take.
White calls Anderson's self-consciousness "plangent". Affectedly melancholy yes; sonorous, not in the least. He confers undeserving intelligence on Anderson the visual stylist with comparisons to Fellini. "The title metaphor of The Darjeeling Limited converts Fellini’s road-of-life metaphor in La Strada into the train itself (it’s an Orient Express seen through Anderson’s storybook wonderment)." To me, that's like saying The Gap ad that appropriated West Side Story (designed by my friend and former boss Happy Massee) "invokes the warring families of Verona in the mean barrios of New York expressing the clear superiority of Gap khakis over those sold by J.Crew." Just because Anderson makes a film set in India and uses a score from Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy doesn't mean he "... also tracks “the road of life” that is the actual translation of Ray’s classic Pather Panchali". Maybe that is what Anderson's up to, but I tend to think it's more like directions I used to hear in the art department when shopping for props for a 60s-themed commercial: "Copy this Lee Friedlander photo except get an Eames chair for the African-American to sit on." More crass commercialism than honoring the antecedent.
My wife is on her own when it comes to Wes Anderson. At least she'll be quoting a commercial bit of pretense for her commercial work rather than a work of art.

Unswayed,
Signore Direttore

The Master Says 262

She wouldn't go with Brad Pitt if you paid her
She's more into James Spader

Saint Etienne

The Master Says 261

Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.

William Ralph Inge