6 Filmmaking Tips From Akira Kurosawa

The Movie King. The Emperor. Even at their height, words fail to capture the towering legacy of a master like Akira Kurosawa. Growing up with a movie fanatic father, the writer/director was educated with thousands of silent films, and he would go on to make perhaps more masterpieces than any other singular filmmaking force. With Throne of Blood, Yojimbo, Seven Samurai, Ran, Rashomon and many more, he became immortal. So here’s a bit of free film school (for fans and filmmakers alike) from a man who had the heart of a child and the mind of a genius. Get Greedy “Movie directors, or should I say people who create things, are very greedy and they can never be satisfied. That’s why they keep on working. I’ve been able to work for so long because I think, ‘Next time, I’ll make something good.’” Who says perfectionism is a bad thing? Perhaps there more to this than simple greed, but the Emperor is pointing out a mindset for excellence that stands as the first step in making sure your creative output is the best it can be. Just as no screenwriter I’ve spoken to has ever said they didn’t care for another shot at re-writing a script, there’s a natural sense of imperfection and incompleteness to any project because the cameras have to roll, the editors have to get their hands on the film, and the audience has to see the end result at some point. Aspiring filmmakers have the ugly luxury of not having a deadline, so they can afford to take another pass on that screenplay. Of course money becomes a factor in getting one more shot or one more cut, but the grand principle here is that you can’t punch the clock at 5 and call it an early day. Work to make the film as good as it can be and know that you can also do better on the next one. In other words: the bad sleep well. Story Comes First “The most important part of my film is the scenario for without a good script, actors are not much use.” Again, do you have some time to polish that script just one more time? This fundamental truth about movies is often (maybe because it’s so obvious) pushed aside, especially when special effects and famous faces seem to engage audiences. Even the big studios are beginning to relearn this powerful lesson (Battleship anyone?) because there’s nothing like a stellar story to send audiences out of the theater in a rush to tell their friends. Aim For a Masterpiece Everytime Don’t Let Success Go To Your Head “What I promise you is that from now on I will work as hard as I can at making movies, and maybe by following this path I will receive an understanding of the true essence of cinema and earn this award.” That’s what Kurosawa said when earning the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy. It puts a few things in perspective, doesn’t it? Keep It Simple “A truly good movie is enjoyable too. There’s nothing complicated about it.” Of course, it’s easier to say that when you’re a technically gifted director with a great ear for dialogue, but there’s a kernel of easy truth in it. Kurosawa’s movies usually have a simple core to them that a bit of chaos tends to flow out of. Even when working with Shakespearean texts, his characters’ motivations are usually singular in focus. It also might be a better task to try to deconstruct the human condition in thirty movies instead of just one. Ask a Common Question What Have We Learned There’s a great emphasis on the pursuit of excellence with many of his interviews and statements. With some, that might seem like false humility, but with Kurosawa continually putting out peerless work while promising that he would really do better with the next one, it’s fairly clear that he had a Jiro-like outlook on mastering a craft. So maybe some of this can seem redundant, or worse, out of reach, but the biggest lesson hear is that this kind of talk comes only with a sturdy basis in practice. The words mean nothing if time isn’t spent learning, getting your hands dirty and gaining one more centimeter on perfection. The tirelessness that shows through in all of his movies is Kurosawa’s true instruction manual. But wearing a jacket that says “It is Wonderful to Create!” might not be a bad idea either.

6 Filmmaking Tips From Kathryn Bigelow

Hanging with bikers, vampires and surfing bank robbers, Kathryn Bigelow has made a name for herself chasing after adrenaline. After mixed reviews and a bad box office break for her Soviet submarine flick K-19: The Widowmaker, Bigelow developed one of writer Mark Boal‘s articles into a television series for Fox called The Inside, then chose to work with him to turn his experiences embedded in Baghdad-patrolling bomb squad into The Hurt Locker. The film — which she never took to studios, opting instead for independent financing and freedom — was a marvel, earning a massive amount of critical love and earning both the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Director for Bigelow. She’s a fierce talent who has weathered a decades-long career to emerge as an important modern storyteller who takes on difficult, true-life events and spins them into profound works. So here’s a bit of free film school (for fans and filmmakers alike) from a woman who likes to blow things up for a living. Ignore the Glass Ceiling “If there’s specific resistance to women making movies, I just choose to ignore that as an obstacle for two reasons: I can’t change my gender, and I refuse to stop making movies.” There’s no way to improve upon that statement. Stand The Heat “We started shooting [The Hurt Locker], just because of the nature of actors’ schedules, in July in 2007 in Amman, and Amman has a slight elevation. I had also scouted Kuwait, which at that time of year, is truly punishing. I think the day I was there, it was about 135 degrees. I couldn’t even imagine what 135 degrees could feel like. It sort of feels like you’re standing in front of an overheated car with the hood up, but you can’t get rid of the car; it’s just this blast of hot air, and it’s very punishing. That was Kuwait. Anyway, we were in Jordan, and there was an average temperature of about 115 degrees, and the most challenging aspect was putting that bomb suit on Jeremy [Renner] every day. Jeremy is an extraordinarily talented actor, but you’re asking him in that kind of climate to put on a piece of wardrobe—it wasn’t just wardrobe, but an actual bomb suit—that weighed between 80 and 100 pounds. Every day. You know, spend all day in it. That was really punishing. I was very sensitive to his needs and his oxygen levels, and trying to keep him as comfortable as possible, there’s only so much that can be done. That was probably the most difficult physical, logistical aspect of the shoot.” All of this was in service of getting as great a sense of authenticity as possible. Bigelow also mentions that going to a studio would result (amongst other things) with them probably wanting to shoot in Morocco if they could even see fit to leave the California desert. That might have been an option, but Bigelow wanted something better, especially in hiring Arabs to play Arabs. As a consequence, they had thermometer-busting heat to deal with, and through all that, her concern was for her lead actor. That’s why this tip can also be called “No Complaining.” If Bigelow can risk dehydration, what’s stopping you from filming in your own backyard? Prepare to Risk (and Keep) Your Job Also, be on the lookout for your Director Making Moment – when doing what’s right for the film means potentially doing the impossible and definitely taking a leap of faith. Don’t Hold Back “If you hold a mirror up to society, and you don’t like what you see, you can’t fault the mirror. It’s a mirror. I think that on the eve of the millennium, a point in time only four years from now, the clock is ticking, the same social issues and racial tensions still exist, the environment still needs reexamination so you don’t forget it when the lights come up. Strange Days is provocative. Without revealing too much, I would say that it feels like we are driving toward a highly chaotic, explosive, volatile, Armageddon-like ending. Obviously, the riot footage came out of the L.A. riots. I mean, I was there. I experienced that. The toughest decision was not wanting to shy away from anything, trying to keep the truth of the moment, of the social environment. It’s not that I condone violence. I don’t. It’s an indictment. I would say the film is cautionary, a wake-up call, and that I think is always valuable.” Bigelow has often, of course, also talked in the same terms about The Hurt Locker — finding the intensity of the real-life situation by shooting from Humvee-level and attempting to capture the danger in a grounded way even while working with a fictional framework. We’re also talking about the director who portrayed Osama Bin Laden’s death on screen. She trades in stark reality now, although she’s dealt with violence nearly all her career. There’s More to Filmmaking Than Making the Film “The research [for Zero Dark Thirty] took us more time than filming the whole movie. The facts and figures kept going back and forth. We had people who were hesitant to talk about what they did, although they were all proud of it.” So here’s the bad part. Filmmaking isn’t all getting behind a camera, calling “Action!” and telling an intern to go grab one of those frosted donuts from craft service. Everyone knows that, but it’s also easy to fall into the trap of being story-ready with something that’s no close to being done. As much as it feels like school, research can be the greatest tool in ensuring a script is strong where it needs to be in order to let the character arcs and dialog shine through. In other words, getting the reality of your world wrong (and even invented worlds need a reality) can be a huge distraction when you’re trying to share characters and situations with an audience. Get that right at the script level, and you’ll have a solid foundation to build everything else on. Even if you’re not shooting a true-life story that’s still fresh in people’s minds, you’ll still want to avoid tripping yourself up on clarity and consistency. Find the Story Behind the Big Story What Have We Learned Refusing to fold into easily into the studio system, taking on severe subject matter with grace and intelligence, and finding the humanity even amid larger-than-life scenarios. These are the actions of a filmmaker with tenacity and, if not fearlessness, the bravery to tackle the fear that naturally arises. For those looking to tackle similar subjects, she’s an inspiration, but there are keen lessons here even for those who don’t care to narratively hunt down Osama Bin Laden. First among them: instead of stifling your passion, finding a way to make everything work despite the risk. Second: invest in an air conditioner.

6 Filmmaking Tips From Peter Jackson

We can all hoist accolades on the filmmakers found in this series, but there are few who are as transparent about their process and actively engaging when it comes to including fans on set (at least via video) than Peter Jackson. Not just a minimal-effort chore for marketing, Jackson seems to relish with childlike abandon in making the Making Of videos and taking audiences behind the scenes of movies while they’re being made. Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising for a details-oriented storyteller who has built entire worlds for us to visually visit. But he wasn’t always sitting on top of Middle-Earth. Before The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, it was more likely you’d catch him with a lawnmower in hand and a bucket of fake blood close by. So here’s a bit of free film school (for fans and filmmakers alike) from someone who fought in the Battle of Helm’s Deep. Filming a Journey is Its Own Journey ” It’s the last movie is the reason you do it, isn’t it? Any time you make a movie, it’s because you want people to see it and enjoy it… Every time you start a film there’s always a degree of excitement because you want to see it [in finished form]. That’s what you’re striving to do. The trilogy [is] all about the third film really. What’s the point of doing any of the others? The two films exist because you’re reaching that third chapter. That’s the one that defines the previous two, and puts them in context. Prior to now, they haven’t had a context. Fellowship was the beginning, Two Towers was the difficult middle chapter that everybody described it as and now you have the third film. Suddenly, everything has a context now. It’s the point of the whole exercise. It has closure too. It has a strong sense of closure. It’s tough for the actors as well because they’re feeling emotional seeing the movie because the movie’s emotional. The movie finishes it off and it sort of represents the ending of all of our journeys. We’ve all become friends on this project. It’s all finishing at the same time, both on screen and off screen. It’s everything I hoped it would be. I hoped it would be sad, that it would capture something of that sadness of the book, but sadness in a way that’s not a downer. It’s just sad but you’re happy that they achieved what they set out to do but there was a price to be paid. ” Seven years is an extreme example, even if it covers three epic-length movies, but this rule applies from Return of the King all the way down to short films. There’s a process in place, and it’s easy to think of it that way, but it’s also a journey with a beginning, middle and end. Hopefully it’s a happy one. Viewing the production process as a journey also reinforces that old idea that who you work with becomes your family. You might get a cake on your birthday at the office, but it’s different when a group of people endeavor through sweat and panic to create something together for themselves. Friendships have the great potential to be forged in a more lasting kind of Summer Camp way, but with tensions riding high, it also means you have to be careful how you treat others on set. And be ready to tear up a bit when it’s all over. There’s a reason wrap parties exist. A Duty to Self-Censorship “[The Lovely Bones is] not a murder film and I wanted kids to be able to go and see it. Film is such a powerful medium. It’s like a weapon and I think you have a duty to self-censor. ‘There are some people who might enjoy watching a 14-year-old girl getting killed, a small minority maybe, but how could you live with yourself in providing that titillation? I wouldn’t want the movie defined by that.” As the Telegraph piece adds, it’s a bit odd to imagine the director of Braindead saying something like that, but either by age or because he viewed those early splat-stick films as “harmless” in their silliness, Jackson recognizes that extreme elements (like the rape and murder of a young girl) can be handled in many different ways depending on the audience you’re looking to reach and the tone you’re looking to shape. You’ll Always Wants to Change a Movie When You Look Back On It But you’ll also want it to stay exactly the same: Know the Physical Limitations of Your Camera “A good example is the way in which, when we did Lord of the Rings, we built miniatures, so anytime you see a piece of architecture or an unreal landscape on Lord of the Rings – whether it’s Mount Doom or Minas Tirith or Helm’s Deep — you’re looking at a miniature. Some of the miniatures are the size of this room. I mean they’re large, and the thing with miniatures is that you’ve got a couple of constraints. One is that you physically, you have a very large camera that you have to get close; if you want to do a shot where the camera’s flying over the rooftops of Minas Tirith, you literally can get the camera so close to the rooftops and sometimes you have to use a periscope lens to get them to be able to drift over the top of the roofs, but if I wanted to fly down between the roofs and go down to the street, I couldn’t because you physically, with a miniature, you couldn’t fit the bulk of the camera into that space. . . so you design the most interesting shots you can.” Jackson goes on to talk about how, with The Hobbit, they used CGI instead of miniatures which meant he could do pretty much anything he wanted (even if that meant flying through someone’s keyhole). This may seem obvious, but knowing intimately those physical constraints can help save time and money during the planning phase, especially if you can work to stretch those limitations without getting yourself into an impossible shot situation. If You Can’t Finish Your Movie, Go Ahead and Finish Your Movie “You’ve got to realize, that when I started doing Bad Taste, it was only a short film. In my mind the enormity of the project was restricted to ten or fifteen minutes, so we started shooting and it just sort of. . . spread. I never, ever dreamt that it would be a feature and I never thought it would until about a year into it. Until then, I hadn’t edited any of the footage – I was just sticking it in tins under my bed – so I took a week off work for editing and put together a 60 minute rough cut only to find it didn’t have an ending. I thought, ‘Christ, there’s nothing I can do, other than just patch on and make a feature.’ It was actually scary at first, making a feature. I thought, ‘It’s impossible, you can’t just make a feature film,’ but then I thought, ‘Why not?’ So I wrote out this ending and we just started shooting again. Not to make this sound so quick though, the film took four years to finish.” If You Can’t Hire Sony or ILM (or WETA), You’ve Got to Do It Yourself What Have We Learned There’s definitely a pioneering spirit to his work, and that might be a bit too “all in” for other filmmakers. After all, most of us probably can’t create a digital effects house from scratch just because we can’t afford Industrial Light and Magic. There’s also a bit of free-wheeling here, made possible by staunch preparation and a sincere passion for the subject matter. Jackson has said he makes movies that he wants to see, the ones he falls in love with as they play in his head, so it’s clear that despite the arduous labor and the time commitment, there’s real love there. Ultimately, it takes a combination like that to make the world believe in your grand scale abilities after only making a few niche flicks far away from Hollywood. Plus, having a lawnmower handy couldn’t hurt.

6 Filmmaking Tips From Quentin Tarantino

Emerging from a nitrate fire in 1963, Quentin Tarantino was fed only exploitation films, spaghetti Westerns and actual spaghetti until he was old enough to thirst for blood. He found his way into the film industry as a PA on a Dolph Lundgren workout video, as a store clerk at Video Archives and by getting encouragement to write a screenplay by the very man who would make a name for himself producing Tarantino’s films. Peter Bogdanovich (and probably many others) think of him as the most influential director of his generation, and he’s got the legendary story to back it up — not to mention line-busting movies like Pulp Fiction, Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained under his belt. He’s also the kind of name that makes introductions like this useless. So here’s a bit of free film school (for fans and filmmakers alike) from a guy who really loves Hi Diddle Diddle and plans to keep 35mm alive as long as he’s rich enough to do it. Lie Until People Think You Worked With Godard “What happens when you start out acting, you gotta have a resume, and if you ain’t done nothin’, you can’t write ‘Nothing.’ People aren’t gonna pay attention to that so you’ve gotta lie. Alright? I had better luck at it than most because I knew a lot about movies and stuff. I was a fan of Jean-Luc Godard, and he’d just had a movie come out. It was from Cannon back in the 80s or something called King Lear. Woody Allen is in it for a moment, and Molly Ringwald is in it, and I saw it. And, it’s like, there’s no way in hell anyone’s gonna see this movie, so I wrote down under ‘Motion Pictures’ on my resume, ‘King Lear – dir. Jean-Luc Godard w/ Woody Allen, Molly Ringwald.’ I even did that with another movie, too, called Dawn of the Dead, you know, the George Romero zombie movie. Well there was a motorcycle guy in the motorcycle gang who kinda looked like me, so I just said it was.” Tarantino is quick to point out that he had the lies down, providing anecdotes from the set and details from the movies. The King Lear lie eventually seeped into his biography in press notes after Reservoir Dogs, but since he found it funny (and never corrected the mistakes), the lie spread even further. He was eventually listed in Leonard Maltin’s “Movies On TV” as being in the cast of Godard’s film. Sadly, IMDB doesn’t list him in it. Of course, there are a ton of people lying to get work in the movie business, so if you’re going to do it, know what you’re talking about and go with gusto. It might also help to know as much about movies as Tarantino. Good Artists Borrow, But Great Artists? “I steal from every movie ever made.” This may be a key deconstructive criticism for his work, but it might also be that he’s simply more honest than everyone else. If we can’t help but pick bits of inspiration from everything, why not be direct? Why not blend them all together to make something new that looks familiar? Who says a director can’t be more like a DJ? You Might Make Guitar Picks Make the Movie On the Page When asked if Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You” was what he originally wanted for the torture scene in Reservoir Dogs: “It’s actually in the script. Which I can tell you I’ll never do again, because the record companies read the script and they know that you want that song. I actually got it — actually extremely cheap — but it was like every other song wasn’t written in the script, so we actually got it for a lot cheaper. They know you want it — it’s written in the script. See, I wanted to make films, and the only thing I could get going was on the page. So I put it all in the script. The big shots. The chase is broken down shot for shot. It’s cut in the script. ‘POV through windshield. Mr. Pink off screen.’ I was making the movie on the page, because it was the only way I could make movies. And then, when I would show it to someone I could say, ‘Look, this is what I’m going to do. I’m not going to do this. Just this.’” That’s a cardinal sin in screenwriting classes, but if you’re planning on directing (or if you don’t have to prove to anyone why you should be the director), it sounds like solid advice. Be Impersonally Personal “My movies are painfully personal, but I’m never trying to let you know how personal they are. It’s my job to make it be personal, and also to disguise that so only I or the people who know me know how personal it is. Kill Bill is a very personal movie. It’s not anyone’s business. It’s my job to invest in it and hide it inside of genre. Maybe there are metaphors for things that are going on in my life, or maybe it’s just straight up how it is. But it’s buried in genre, so it’s not a ‘how I grew up to write the novel’ kind of piece. Whatever’s going on with me at the time of writing is going to find its way into the piece. If that doesn’t happen, then what the hell am I doing? So if I’m writing Inglourious Basterds and I’m in love with a girl and we break up, that’s going to find its way into the piece. That pain, the way my aspirations were dashed, that’s going to find its way in there. So I’m not doing a James L. Brooks—I loved how personal Spanglish was, but I thought that where Sofia Coppola got praised for being personal, he got criticized for being personal in the exact same aching way. But that doesn’t interest me, at least not now, to do my little story about my little situation. The more I hide it, the more revealing I can be.” Think Outside the Casting List What Have We Learned Tarantino’s appeal is sort of hidden in plain sight. Yes, it’s easy to love his twisted takes on genre and the beauty of his violent, idiosyncratic characters. But he also represents the movie geek who ascended beyond fandom to become a creator. He is the promise of every cinephile who has even a shred of ambition to write a script or direct. He’s proof that being a huge nerd can pay off in a supreme way. Not just that you can become a filmmaker, but that you can be heralded for doing it exactly the way you want to do it. His existence and dominance proves that it can be done! Like Bigelow and others, he’s avoided the mainstream route while finding mainstream success. That’s something afforded to him (as he’s recognized) because his style was so thoroughly embraced by audiences. He didn’t use Pulp Fiction as a springboard to taking on blockbuster budgets within the studio system. Instead, he saw its success as a continuation of the movies everyone wanted him to make — so he happily kept making them. With intense detail, aggressive focus and just a little bit of lying.

6 Filmmaking Tips From Silent Era Icon Harold Lloyd

An icon of the silent film era, Harold Lloyd first appeared on the silver screen in the short film The Old Monk’s Tale. Its release in February 1913 means this is the 100th anniversary of the start of Lloyd’s movie career. A decade after that not-at-all-illustrious beginning, he would star in Safety Last!, which is almost definitely his most famous film — an unbelievably funny film where a simple store clerk organizes a contest to climb a tall building and ends up having to do it himself. Like Buster Keaton, Lloyd was a master of stunt work, making it look so effortless that audiences could be simultaneously stunned, awed and relieved. Laughter often followed gasps. He was also a director and producer with a unique perspective on the birth of a popular art form. The question is whether his viewpoint can still teach us a few things about the process of filmmaking. I think there is, so here’s a bit of free film school (for fans and filmmakers alike) from a man we’ve known for a hundred years. Comedy is Tension “The more trouble you get a man into, the more comedy you get out of him.” There’s been a tendency among some films (and certainly in the amateur film world) to take it easy on characters. If they get into any trouble at all, they’re whisked away from it too quickly. There’s an ease there that makes everything safe and fatally injures the ability to craft strong humor. The truth is, there’s danger to be found in the synopses of many of the best comedies ever made. In Dr. Strangelove, the world is on the brink of nuclear annihilation with idiots in front of the big red button. In Blazing Saddles, a black sheriff is sent to protect a racist town that’s repeatedly been ransacked and brutalized. In Lloyd’s own Grandma’s Boy, a cowardly young man is tricked into facing a violent criminal in order to prove his courage and win the heart of the woman he loves. Done differently, all of these films could just as easily have been dramas or thrillers. They tackle difficult subject matter, adult situations and life-ending threats. Their characters are in very real danger, and that makes them far, far more funny. Be The Best At What You Do Lloyd got his start playing a character named “Lonesome Luke” who bore a striking resemblance to Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp. He made over 60 shorts featuring the character between 1915 and 1917, but then he did something unexpected. He retired the character, later citing Chaplin’s perfection of the style as his reason for leaving it behind. Instead of coming out the loser in the situation, Lloyd focused on his everyman Glass character and found huge success in the following years. Instead of being thought of as a second-rate Chaplin, he evolved as a film persona and ended up being prolific and wealthy. Plus, you know, he’s remained a movie icon for a century. A Gimmick Creates an Image, But Humanity Creates a Legacy Lloyd once noted that his famous glasses created a notable trademark for only 75 cents. But it took removing them to make him the relatable figure that solidified his career: Create Your Thrill First, Worry About the Rest Later “About using scripts. In Safety Last, prob­a­bly one of our most pop­u­lar films, we did the final scenes of that clock climb first. We didn’t know what we were going to have for the begin­ning of the film. We hadn’t made up the open­ing. After we found that we had, in our opin­ion, a very, very good thrill sequence, some­thing that was going to be pop­u­lar and bring in a few shekels, we went back and fig­ured out what we would do for a begin­ning and worked on up. We tried out the same thing in The Fresh­man.” This probably only works if you’re a towering talent, but there’s something to the truth that crafting the water cooler moment gives you some leeway with the overall feel of the rest of the film. Obviously few audiences now will tolerate an hour of their time wasted simply to get to the jaw-dropping part (we can just YouTube it…), but having a great idea and building a centerpiece to start with aren’t such bad methods. Comedy is Naturalism “The man who tries to be funny is lost. To lose one’s naturalness is always to lose the sympathy of your audience.” There are a lot of things that people mistakenly think are funny, but we can all hopefully recognize that there are few things as un-funny as someone trying hard to get a laugh. In fact, proclaiming that you’re funny may be the easiest way to turn off an audience (unless you’ve already shown that you have the skills). Comedy works either as normal people adjust to an insane situation or insane people invade a normal setting, but that dichotomy has to exist. They magnify one another and create, you guessed it, tension. “The spectacle of a fat man slipping on an icy sidewalk never fails to get a laugh. The same is true of a man attempting to drive a nail and mashing his finger in the process, or a man with his arms full of bundles attempting to keep his hat from blowing off. These things are funny because they have happened to all of us and probably will happen again. They are trying experiences for the individuals involved and we sympathize with them. But we laugh, nevertheless because they are human touches.” Be Able to Do Something Extraordinary With due respect to stunt work by Harvey Parry too. The question is this: if you can’t climb a building, what can you do that’s just as amazing? How can you utilize that in your filmmaking? What Have We Learned Film is a young art. It may not feel that way at times, and the atmosphere of today’s market might seem alien to those who first propelled Lloyd to stardom, but there are a few mainstays that keep the core of the art form looking as it did all those years ago. That one good idea can blossom into a wonderful movie, that hard work and raw talent can spell success, that putting someone beyond the safety of peace and comfort is the best start to building comedy. Imagine that you made something as thrilling as the Clock Scene in Safety Last! was to audiences at the time. Audiences would have almost no choice but to stand up and take notice. That takes becoming the best at something – just as Lloyd did – and dedicating yourself to its further perfection. But don’t climb any skyscrapers without safety gear or anything.

6 Filmmaking Tips From John McTiernan

He’s made some amazing films, he stands as an icon of a lengthy era, but I submit that John McTiernan is still an unfairly maligned filmmaker. He’s relegated by many to a position as merely a mindless action director, and maybe, yeah, Rollerball was tough to stomach, but there’s a reason why Die Hard is still used as the template in thousands of pitch meetings every year. Plus, the guy went to Juilliard (so he’s probably also an incredible dancer). Those who dismiss him do so at their own peril and have clearly never heard the man speak about the craft of filmmaking. He knows a production truck’s worth of practical information and can condense it into lessons that make sense to all of us rubes. So here’s a bit of free film school (for fans and filmmakers alike) from a man who started his studio career by having an alien attack Arnold Schwarzenegger. A Good Idea Needs a Good Script (and Vice Versa) “You see a lot of good ideas or well-written scripts that are bad ideas.” Easier said than done, sure, but think back to the times you’ve returned to the theater lobby irritated by how the movie you just saw squandered a brilliant concept (one that you could have knocked out of the park!). There’s tension there. Movies like that naturally come packaged with the question “How could someone smart enough to come up with that concept not know how to do anything with it?” stapled to their one-sheets. The yang to its yin is the film that’s solid but built on a shaky foundation, and the same grating feeling comes with that ticket price. There are two check marks to earn here: good idea, good execution. That combination is one of the reasons Die Hard is so beloved (and has spawned such a lasting series of films). An everyman fish-out-of-water fighting off witty terrorists with no escape but victory. It wasn’t a well-worn idea at the time, and the storytelling is so tight, and McClane is in such a state of suspended danger (even when he’s not being shot at), that the material remains compelling long after the appeal of the idea itself fades away. And that’s really the bottom line. A good idea gets you the first 10 pages of a script, but where will the next 110 come from? What’s the second good idea, and the third, and the fourth that you can pile on top of the first to make something packed with goodness instead of something laboring under the weight of a single interesting concept? We’re Wasting Our Time with This Filmmaking Tips Series “You can’t tell filmmakers anything, no matter what stage of life they are in. If you could, they wouldn’t be film directors.” Damn, I love this guy. Even if it means I should pack this all in. Maybe for the sake of the column we’ll call this one “You’ve Got to Learn A Lot On Your Own Through Failure.” Yeah, that sounds good. Of course, he’s also given this advice: “It’s the same thing of how you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. Also, I’d say get a hold of a video camera and just shoot as much as you can, of anything. If you have a script, get a couple actors together and shoot two pages from the script, then edit the footage on a really basic video editing program. It takes as long to develop a prose style on film as it does a prose style in writing, so it’s crucial to practice whenever and however you can.” Think of Camera Movement as Music Allow Yourself to Discover a Character Along the Way And to let your actors help with that construction beyond the writing. From our Commentary Commentary entry on Die Hard: “In the script, John McClane is a tough-as-nails New York cop, but McTiernan and Bruce Willis didn’t really have the character sorted out until about halfway through shooting. It was then they figured out this was a guy who didn’t like himself very much, but who’s doing the best he could. The little moment of McClane banging his head against the door frame after fighting with Holly was a reshoot done after the character was figured out.” That is, hopefully you have the money for reshoots if they’re needed. Be Ready to Lose Weight and Hate Life “The biggest disconnect between what the studio was trying to enforce for the action sequences and what McTiernan wanted to do himself, is the opening siege on the camp, which was mostly constructed by his second unit team and is frightfully boring. Gone are McTiernan’s fluid, subjective shots, and in their place are flat plates of things exploding and people firing guns. At the very beginning of the DVD commentary track, McTiernan admits that the production was, ‘terrifying in a lot of ways.’ (And not just because everyone got really sick – in one sequence Arnold performs while an IV drip is sticking out of his arm, just off camera. McTiernan himself lost 25 pounds, just from not eating.) Elsewhere on the same DVD, Carl Weathers describes McTiernan on set: ‘I remember a lot of times seeing John with his head in his hands, like ‘What the hell have I gotten myself into?’” What Have We Learned First of all, not to underestimate the intelligence of action directors. Second of all, that a filmmaker career sometimes shapes up in the most illogical way possible. McTiernan had very little knowledge of how to shoot action when he made Predator, but he knew he wanted to imbue the film with a new sense of motion and editing that had people puzzled. The Juilliard-attending, AFI graduate became an icon of action filmmaking — a surprising twist of fate — specifically because he wanted to do something different. You can’t be a pioneer in a field by maintaining the status quo. His career also shows that there are sacrifices to be made, that working with the studio system can be a grueling nightmare, and that having a great idea isn’t good enough. You have to push beyond it, build on it, and then make something that’s more than its logline.

6 Filmmaking Tips From Ang Lee

Coming off of his second Oscar win for Best Director, Ang Lee is as fierce a filmmaking force as ever. But even if his name comes with a sheen of prestige, it doesn’t change a broad range of topics and tones that he’s been able to capture on screen. This is the man who made the Civil War-era Ride with the Devil and contemporary dramedy Eat Drink Man Woman. Not to mention Brokeback Mountain right after Hulk. The man’s versatile. So here’s a bit of free film school (for fans and filmmakers alike) from the Crouching Tiger From Taiwan. Make What You Don’t Know “I did a women’s movie, and I’m not a woman. I did a gay movie, and I’m not gay. I learned as I went along.” Imagine that. You can step outside your own experiences and make something poetic and meaningful. Or absurd and entertaining — whatever you’re aiming for. Of course, the last part of Lee’s statement is the most important there. You cannot simply be a storyteller in sheep’s clothing; you have to do enough to understand the points of view that you’re attempting to present. Otherwise, they’ll ring hollow, and you might as well stick to what you know. Ultimately, the real lesson is to make what you don’t know yet. Prepare to Immediately Regret Your Decisions “Kid, water, big special effects, animals – and they have to be in a small boat on water. It seemed to be a filmmaker’s every nightmare. I thought it was difficult and challenging and I got geared up and decided ‘I’ll be the one to do this’, but once I got into it I thought it was a dumb idea to have picked it up.” Challenges are supposed to be scary. In that interview, Lee details a bit more about the challenges facing him when making Life of Pi, particularly the mountain of filming the unfilmable and adding the difficulty of 3D. This is probably the only practical lesson here, but it’s a big one. Think of how many script and filmmaking contests are out there, think about how many you’ve entered, think about the time and money that gets spent trying to win. Now think about what these contests are actually offering as a prize. That’s not to say that anything less than full funding of your winning script is a waste of time, but it’s paramount to weigh the reward against the cost. Pay Attention to the Non-Obvious Chance at the Big Leagues “How can you resist working with Emma Thompson? In [Sense and Sensibility] I didn’t think I did anything new for myself as a filmmaker, but I was bringing myself up to a new level. For an eastern director, it was the first significant western movie. Sense and Sensibility scared me because I had to prove I can endure a studio production, I can direct English language, I can work with a movie star, and so on.” Be honest. If you were offered a period piece based on a classic novel for an Oscar-winning actress who’d most recently appeared in an Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy and who was getting her first screenplay made, would you think for a second that you were about to launch to super stardom? Probably not. But that’s the movie that really changed the game for Lee (while scoring 7 Oscar nominations). The key is that there are opportunities that might not seem like launch pads even if they are ready to send the right person into orbit. Keep your eyes peeled. Let Emotions Be Your Guide “There is more than one way to make movies. To me it has to be led by emotion. That’s the only thing I could trust when making a movie. Emotions serve characters’ purposes. That is their motivation. Or at least it’s my safety net. The times you just don’t know what to do, every day people are asking you hundreds of questions: what should we do about this? The that? If we can’t do this, what about that? You have to have something centered around you, and to me, that’s always emotion. I’m an emotional person; maybe I rely on it. Maybe I’m melodramatic, I don’t know.” What Have We Learned For the diversity, there are also some common kernels and themes that flow between the projects that Lee chooses to do. It’s kind of interesting to think about an alternative universe where Lee ended his career with Hulk, but thankfully he decided to get over his weariness by making something more intimate. Had he not done so, had he not continued on with Brokeback Mountain, he probably would have gone on to live comfortably as a professor somewhere without an Academy Award to his name. His lessons here are challenging because they demand a certain amount of attention being paid to the unfulfilled possibilities of storytelling. Just as Lee sees a common Western-set love story in a movie many regard as controversial, he has also been able to see different routes to success, and he’s taken them not just to get ahead, but also because of their inherent value. What that all amounts to is seeing something that’s hidden or, even more difficult, seeing something that hasn’t even come into focus yet. It’s about anticipating qualities in stories that others don’t readily recognize, and being able to bring them to the surface in a way that makes everyone catch on.