Lucas took it all in, reading books and comics, watching movies, filing away the bits and pieces he liked, discarding what he didn’t. “I researched kids’ movies and how they work and how myths work,” Lucas said, “and I looked very carefully at the elements of films within that fairy tale genre which made them successful. I found that myth always took place over the hill, in some exotic, far off land. For the Greeks, it was Ulysses going off into the unknown. For America it was out West. . . . The last place left ‘over the hill’ is space.”
May the Fourth be with you.
Jones, Brian Jay. George Lucas: A Life. United States, Little, Brown, 2016. pp179
My work, come to think about it, does seem often to consist of filming scenes I’ve experienced myself that I want to bring back, scenes I’d like to live through and scenes I’d be afraid to live or relive. With that system, which is worth what it’s worth, once the theme is chosen, the script almost writes itself, and I don’t fuss too much over whatever significance comes out of it.
François Truffaut
From: Interview by Serge Daney, Jean Narboni, and Serge Toubiana, Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 316, October 1980
In all my films there are people who send each other letters, a young girl who writes in her diary. Nor can I move from one place to another without a map. That is simply not done anymore, but it’s in my character: to leave even one person uninformed distresses me. The taste for writing has been pursuing me ever since I concerned myself as a critic with the form of the screenplay. I didn’t think I’d become a filmmaker, but rather, a scriptwriter.
François Truffaut
From: Interview by Anne de Gasperi, Le Quotidien de Paris, May 2, 1975
Truffaut, François. Truffaut by Truffaut. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc, 1985.
In the early days I made a living, but only just. I lived with very few possessions, most of which were the tools of my trade: an Arriflex camera, a car, a typewriter, a flatbed editing machine, a Nagra tape recorder. My material needs have always been limited. So long as I have a roof over my head, something to read and something to eat, all is fine. I own one pair of shoes, a single suit, and once I finish a book I pass it on to a friend. I’m just a man from the mountains who isn’t very interested in owning things.
What makes Herzog rich?
What makes me rich is that I’m welcomed almost everywhere. I can show up with my films and am offered hospitality, something you could never achieve on money alone.
And the struggle for true liberty:
I have struggled harder than you can imagine for true liberty, and today am privileged in the way a boss of a huge corporation ever will be. Hardly anyone in my profession is as free as I am.
You can open any page of A Guide for the Perplexed and unearth a gem.
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. pp246
Filmmaking is about creating immediate and profound connections with people. I have a rather biblical-sounding axiom for you: to be a filmmaker you need to know the heart of men.
– Werner Herzog
Cronin, Paul. Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. pp238
is to look into the deepest recesses of the soul. When it comes to such things, I have acquired the required vision thanks to certain essential experiences. What is it like to be imprisoned? To go hungry? To raise children? To be stranded alone in the desert? To face genuine danger? To walk a thousand miles? To handle a Kalashnikov? To keep a group of youngsters entertained? To be astounded by poetry? Much of what we do as filmmakers is inexplicable, but the groundwork is done without a camera and the barrier it creates. Give me the name of the film school that teaches such things.
– Werner Herzog
Acquiring the “vision” takes living. Absorb your experiences.
Sami theorizes that Anderson’s fine grained visual style came out of his writing, which is similarly exact. There’s not much room for verbal improvisation in a Wes Anderson picture because the dialogue is written to mirror, complicate, or intensify Anderson’s filmmaking choices. Every ellipsis, comma, colon, semicolon, exclamation point, parenthetical, and period in a line of dialogue complements the camera movements, lighting, visual effects, sound effects, and music. It’s all of a piece. Filmmaking is screenwriting, screenwriting is filmmaking. All is text. The discrete shots are phrases, sentences, or paragraphs within the larger manuscript of the film. Words matter. Punctuation matters. Sentence length matters. The longer more elaborate camera moves in a Wes Anderson picture could be compared to a monologue in the theater, or a run-on sentence in an essay or novel that keeps going and going till it finally stops.
Scripts can be dismissed in terms of how a movie looks visually. We typically think storyboards and dailies communicate the visual direction the filmmaker desires.
But as Sanjay Sami theorizes, the preciseness of Anderson’s scripts, e.g. word choice, punctuation, the location of a colon or exclamation point, all contribute to the look.
Screenwriting is filmmaking. Akira Kurosawa agrees:
Legendary Japanese filmmaker AKIRA KUROSAWA with advice for aspiring writers everywhere. pic.twitter.com/czIHjJD2Kq
— All The Right Movies (@ATRightMovies) July 28, 2023
Quit your complaining. It’s not the world’s fault that you wanted to be an artist. It’s not the world’s job to enjoy the films you make, and it’s certainly not the world’s obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to hear it. Steal a camera if you must, but stop whining and get back to work.
First Steven Spielberg, who is, if you make movies, if you direct movies, this is somebody who can help you. You look to his movie for solutions. He usually found a way to do it right. He’s one of my favorites.
Floodlights and Goalposts 