If a film can provoke the audience’s participation – if the film gives a certain amount of information but requires the audience to complete the ideas, then it engages each member of the audience as a creative participant in the work. How each moment gets completed depends on each individual person. So the film, although it’s materially the same series of images and sounds, should, ideally, provoke slightly different reactions from each person who sees it.Even though it’s a mass medium, it’s those individual reactions that make each person feel the film is speaking to him or her. The fantastic thing about the process is that they actually see their own version on the screen. They would swear that they saw it, but in fact it wasn’t there. Enough was there so that they completed it in their own way, but as it’s happening they don’t stop to think: That’s just me completing it. They really see something that appears as authentic to them as anything else that’s actually physically in the film.
How does this happen? It can only be because the film is ambiguous in the right places and draws something out of you that comes from your own experience. And then you see it on screen and think: Only I know that, so the film must be made for me.
Walter Murch, The Conversations: Walter Murch and
the Art of Editing Film, by Michael Ondaatje, p.46-47.
(Murch is the legendary film and sound editor who's worked on The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Apocalypse Now and its re-release, all the Godfather movies, The Conversation, and many other movies. [As you may be able to tell from his filmography, he went to film school with Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas and has remained close to them.] This marvelous book does for editing what Visions of Light did for cinematography. It examines how editors have contributed to the history of film, clearly explains what an editor does for both film and sound, and, thanks to Murch's incredibly diverse self-education, relates cinema to music and literature – Murch calls Edison, Beethoven, and Flaubert the "Three Fathers" of film: Edison for the mechanics, Beethoven for dynamics, and Flaubert for realism. It's fascinating reading that opens your eyes to a new way of watching and assessing a movie and will probably teach you a great deal about many other fields than cinema. As a bonus, novelist Ondaatje contributes thoughts about his writing process and creativity and storytelling in general.)
[Jez] Butterworth, who wrote the script [for Birthday Girl] with his brother Tom, says he was inspired by his favorite films, particularly those by two of Hollywood's most brilliant writer-directors from another era, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder. "They knew something then that I think people have forgotten about entertainment," he says.Washington Post, Jan. 29, 2002"The films that are being made now just have 2 percent of the humor of them. I watched America's Sweethearts the other day on the plane, and you're like, 'Now go back and write that film, and go and shoot that again,' because nobody wrote it. Someone had a proposal -- 'wouldn't it be funny if?' -- and they went and shot it."
In so many films now, what Butterworth likes to call "joke-oids" take the place of actual jokes. "They look like a joke and they sound like a joke, but they're not -- like the replicants in Blade Runner that look like people but deep down they're not," he says. "In American film at the moment, so much of what is called comedy is just shtick. It's just a way with a line or an attitude, or subversion of an expected genre... like Shrek. "
The films Butterworth has admired, like Wilder's Ace in the Hole and Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, taught him to strive when writing a script. "It's to do with the degree of difficulty," he says. "In Olympic diving you can set yourself a really easy dive to do or you can set yourself a really complicated dive. And I'd rather see a complicated dive fail than an easy one succeed."
When you make something that you like and audiences reject it, the experience can be painful. But I have discovered ... that when you make something that you yourself aren't exactly satisfied with and someone tells you it's great, that's even more painful and frustrating.Jean-Pierre Jeunet in Moviemakers' Master Class, by Laurent Tirard, 2002. The book is fascinating, distillations of directors' techniques and philosophies on making a movie, including writing (or not writing) a script, working with actors, camera techniques, etc.
Don't try to make comedies if you don't have a sense of humor, even if the script is an adaptation of an original Billy Wilder. If you don't know what a human being is, don't try to make dramas. Be conventional and accept work making sequels of sequels. If your films make money, it will not matter if they seem like real life or not.Pedro Almodóvar, MovieMaker Magazine, Fall 2002
I did it, or I didn't do it. If I didn't do it, there's no use talking about it. And if I did it, I don't have to talk about it at all. To me, making it explicit is about as rewarding as explaining why a joke is funny. You know, you either say the joke and they laugh, or they don't. Explaining why the joke is funny gets you nothing, except it makes you look a little bit like an ass. ... It's subtextual. You can get it from that level and if you do, it'll make an even more profound experience. But if that part goes over your head, well, then, fine. Just enjoy the movie.Quentin Tarantino, Premiere, May 2004, discussing -- or, rather, refusing to discuss -- a theme in his movie with an attitude I wish more directors would take toward spelling things out in their movies.
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