Nikhil Banerjee Interview 1985 (link)

So much wisdom it hurts. Excellent advice on what it takes to become good.

I know he had a legendary temper; did he ever actually lose his temper with you and scold or beat you? 
Yes, yes, he has done it to everybody. Even, you know, he was a court musician of Maihar, a small state, he used to teach the king old dhrupad compositions, and one day he actually threw the tabla hammer at him, at the king! He was such a man, he knew only music, nothing else! If you make any mistake, naturally as a human being, how could it be possible each time to immediately pick up whatever he says? Sometimes because of lack of concentration or something. But he will not repeat anything twice or thrice! The first time he sang, you had to pick it up! If you said, “Sorry, I have missed that,” he will just immediately kick you! He was an extremely strict man! But besides all these things, can you tell me in the history of Indian classical music any great musician who has created so many good students? No other than Allauddin Khansahib; he’s the only person in the history of Indian classical music to produce great exponents like Ali Akbar Khansahib, Ravi Shankar, Annapurna-devi, Pannalal Ghosh, Timir Baran, all these great musicians and each one is top in their field. He was such a great man. And as he was not a traditional musician, he was completely different than any other traditional gharana musicians. He used to say, “Whatever I have learned, I am ready to give you. If you’ve got the power, just pick it up from me.” But all his students will know it was so difficult. He was so vast-how much you can learn. He was exceptionally great, exceptionally great but with very, very strong and strict discipline. Nowadays it’s hard to imagine! During your training period, you’re not supposed to go to movies, not supposed to read any books, you have hardly energy left for any other activities! Practice starts from four o’clock in the morning and it ends at eleven o’clock at night. There is a little break for breakfast, a little break for lunch, a little for dinner, a little for washing and other things, but we actually played from four o’clock in the morning till eleven o’clock at night. So hardly any energy was left. 
How could your fingers manage that? 
Oh, oh, no! When I first went there it happened to everybody-your whole hand, your fingers were cut and sewn up! And he used to tell us, “As long as you are alive you have to practice! If you die, I’ll be happy! Better you die, but as long as you’re alive you’ll have to practice, you cannot stop!” But now you can see how much love was there. Why he did all these things, why the strictness was there-because he used to love me! He used to think that, “Now you must do something! As you have taken this subject, you cannot leave this, you must do, you must leave behind some mark!” The training period was very, very rigorous-and I myself think even the world is changing, this country is so advanced, but there is no second way. Really if you want to play music or anything, you’ll have to forget the world at least for four or five years, and just concentrate on music. You play music, you think music, dream music, eat music-just live in music! That’s all! I think there is no other way if you really want to become a great musician. It’s not only Indian music, it’s everywhere, all over the world. 
…
What direction did your career take after leaving Maihar? What was it like reentering the performance world after years of seclusion? 
After Maihar, I knew that I would have to concentrate more and more on the sitar. But you cannot afford to give so much time because once you start performing you become busy. Now I really think that if someone supports me with money someday and my family is provided for, I really want to practice! I really want to practice now! I love music, it is endless, so the more you practice, the more you are in the Deep Ocean-you don’t know where to go; you’re in Space! Of course, I had confidence after learning from Allauddin Khansahib but there was a great point in front of me: Vilayat Khan was there, and Ravi Shankar-ji was there, Ali Akbar Khansahib was there, and all these great stalwarts just in front of me! Until I’ve got some sort of individuality, who will listen to my music? After coming from Maihar, I was a little nervous for some time and I was really searching for a way to cut my own path because these three great instrumentalists hadn’t left a single point through which to take up and dig out your own way. For some time I was really very much disturbed in my mind, “What should I do? Which way should I go? Which will be the correct way?” Of course, the teaching was there and what Allauddin Khansahib has given was there, but still in the practical world when you are actually struggling, that was a time-for many years I was really searching. As a whole performer, how to place your individuality in front of these great instrumentalists? These three great instrumentalists have not neglected a single phrase or portion of Indian classical music; they’ve got their own individuality and are really great. 


Posted 2 months ago

Permalink

Interview with William Hurt (link)

Paddy Chayefsky owned his own work. No writer owns his own work. They disenfranchised all artists. They started it in the Twenties and Thirties by buying the writers’ work. The first thing they did to de-ball all of us was buy the writer’s work. They can change any word they want to, they can still slap his name up there and they can still say it’s his idea, that he agreed what they did to those words, but he probably didn’t, or she didn’t. So that was the beginning of the disenfranchising of the collaborative effort of theatre. Then they took the director and instead of allowing him to be the facilitator and communicator of ideas, appreciator of talents, they turned him in the hirer or firer and administrator, which is exactly the opposite to his function, and they take the actor and instead of allowing him to transcend through character they turn him into a narcissist personality who has to sell himself out of the box. End of story. Goodbye. Goodbye, theatre. Goodbye, usefulness. Goodbye to work. Goodbye.

So why did you make it?

Because I spent two weeks having dinner three times a week with Arthur Penn figuring out a way for me to get out of film after making one movie. I had no obligations to do PR. I had a guarantee that I was personally in control of the character. I had director approval until 48 hours before we started filming. I had no obligation to market at all. And I had those protections in my contract for many many many years. You couldn’t make me market a film that I didn’t like, that I didn’t approve of. You couldn’t make me sell something where I thought I’d been lied to or cheated or where the promise of something had been deliberately deceitfully lied about. You couldn’t make me smile on something I didn’t want to smile on.

It was on that basis you agreed to do it?

Yes, and I was with Arthur. And on the basis of at least three weeks of full rehearsal. Which Paddy was of course all in favour of because he was an artist.

And the best part:

These are your tools, so go ahead. Use the sucker. Do something with it. Don’t just let it shoot. The word “shoot” - bad word. The word “cut” - bad word. The word “show” - bad word. The only word is work. Work is the word. Work makes you freer, man. Because it gets you outside of your petty self-conscious insecure self.
That was the phrase used by the Nazis.
I know that. It’s over Auschwitz. That’s why I use it. I study that a lot. Since I was 14, I’ve been studying the Holocaust


Posted 2 months ago

Permalink

An interview with Ritwik Ghatak (link)

When you prepare to make a film and choose subjects, what do you look for and look at?
People. I look at the struggle and misery of contemporary life. And try to say that “to the best of my ability”. My only concern is men and women of my country. I have nothing else. It does not matter whether my countrymen accept me or reject me. My only subject is my men and women. What else have I got?
What should be the primary objective of making films? 
The primary objective of making films is to do good to mankind. If you do not do good to humanity, no art is a true work of art. Rabindranath said that art must be faithful to truth first and to beauty secondarily (dipanjan: reference to satyam and sundaram). This truth comes out of an artist’s own perceptions and meditations. Since truth is never everlasting and constant and as this world is always subjective and changing, everyone must arrive at their personal truth with their entire life’s deepest thoughts and understandings. One should accept that truth only after fully realizing it. Art is not a trivial thing.


Posted 2 months ago

Permalink

Interview with Béla Tarr (link)

You know it’s a long way from my first film till now (laughs). It’s step by step, from film to film, everything is moved a little bit, changed a little bit . . .I often have the feeling that we make always the same movie, just always a little bit better. We try each time to make a little bit better. So the style was never a question, you know, it’s coming from the last movie, the last movie was coming from the previous movie, and so forth . . . I cannot tell you many things about it. Have you seen my last movie?


Posted 2 months ago

Permalink

Pedro Costa Interview in EYE WEEKLY (link)

Do you see your work as a cross between sociological study and narrative film?
It’s that special moment when true and false don’t matter. You have to be true in other ways. The relation between people has to be true. I can tell you that a lot of things that Varda says and does are not true. I’ll never say what and when. Withholding it amuses me.

How does that play to your audience?   
Whenever In Vanda’s Room is shown at a documentary festival, people get really angry. I’ve had ferocious Q&As. The argument is always, “You cannot do this in a documentary. It’s too vague, too poetic.” Those statements bore me to death.


Posted 3 months ago

Permalink

Interview Notes - Nuri Bilge Ceylan at BFI Southbank (link)

Photo by Unknown

GA: And there are elements of Chekhov in there, as well?

NBC: Yes, actually in all my films I believe there is an element of Chekhov, because Chekhov wrote so many stories. He had stories about almost every situation, and I love them very much. So maybe he’s influenced the way I look at life. Life follows Chekhov for me, in a way. After reading Chekhov, you begin to see the same kind of situations in life. And in the scriptwriting stage, I remember the stories somehow, so yes, Chekhov is here.

…

GA: One of the things that strikes me about this film is that a lot of it is shot with very, very little dialogue, and that seems to be a common thing in your films. Do you think that people express themselves better without words?

NBC: I don’t know, actually. I don’t try to make my characters silent. In the script, that scene had a lot of dialogue. But in the shoot, it’s the only place to understand whether what you wrote works or not. Always during a shoot, I try to find more balance in the situation, so I end up taking dialogue out here and there and finally there’s no dialogue. I feel the balance is reached at that point and I don’t know what to do about it. It just convinces me more like that, somehow. And of course, dialogue should be treated very carefully. I’ve investigated this a lot. I’ve recorded many conversations in order to understand the nature of it. It doesn’t follow a logical progression. Somebody says something, the other person says something entirely different; if you analyse it, you see it is that way. So dialogue, even if you use it, it shouldn’t be so logical and it shouldn’t carry much information about the film’s secrets or the meaning of the film. Dialogue, for me, only works if they talk nonsense, anything unrelated to the film. I like to do this as much as possible. I try to tell the meaning of the film without dialogue – with the situation, the gestures, and so on. This is my intention, but maybe I’m not successful.

…

Q4: This has been said before many times: that your compositional style is very similar to [Yasujiro] Ozu, especially in your positioning of the camera at very low level, perhaps knee-height, especially in the scenes inside the house. Did you purposely mimic Ozu or was it something that you did unintentionally? Also, can you say whether this compositional style is particularly important to avoid tracking shots and movement of camera work, as opposed to single shots.

NBC: Yes, he [GA] said the same thing during dinner. Ozu is my favourite director, actually. And yes, I don’t move the camera much – but I don’t know if that’s because of Ozu or because I’m a photographer. I jut don’t like to move the camera much, really, because it makes everyone more conscious about the camera. And the height of the camera is mostly decided for me, and I think for Ozu, by the vertical lines in the space. In the books, they say that Ozu put his camera 90cm above the ground but I don’t believe it. It depends on the vertical lines – and there are many of those in Japanese houses. But more than that, the psychology of the character is important – if you shoot a person from above, it’s different from shooting them from below. I generally like to shoot at mouth level for a portrait. Especially in closeups, even 1cm is very important. That’s why you should never leave it to the cinematographer, because the cinematographer never knows how to connect it to the next shot; only the director knows the relationship between the next shot and the previous shot. So the director should carefully place the camera to ensure continuity of the psychology.

Q5: Why did you decide not to use a conventional musical soundtrack?

NBC: I don’t like music in cinema, it seems to me like a crutch; if you cannot express something in cinematic ways, then you call the help of the music to underline it. I’m not against it, but if possible I try not to use it. In the editing, I try many pieces of music, but eventually I decide not to use any. And also, the sound of the atmosphere is the nicest sound for me in the cinema, so I prefer to use atmospheric sound instead of music. Because music kills things.

Click on the link in the title.


Posted 6 months ago

Permalink

Interview Notes - Robert Bresson with Ronald Hayman (link)

Photographer Unknown

He is very eloquent on working with non actors, on improvisation, on being inside, on restraint and much else. Here are some especially powerful parts:

  • Q:  Is economy a different problem when you’re working in colour instead of black and white?
    A: The problem of unity is the same. You touch people’s emotions with unity of effect. You must start from the blank screen and start from the silence. I like silence very much. When I read this little sentence—”Silence was pleas’d”—in Milton’s Paradise Lost, I liked the idea of silence being pleased.
    Another thing I was aware of was that nearly all gestures, all of our ways of talking, are mechanical. It’s true. You put your hand like this. Look. There are two pages in Montaigne about the way our hands go where we don’t want them to go. He’s a writer who isn’t really difficult. You can always read a page or two and find something. Theatre consists of well controlled gestures and words. Cinema must be something different—not controlled. It must be the equivalent of life, like any art, but certainly not copied or simulated. There must be little elements of life, of reality, captured separately, little by little with the extraordinary machine which is the camera. Then when you put them together in a certain way, a sudden life comes out of it—cinematic life, which is not at all like everyday life. Nor is it like the life of the theatre. The life of the theatre is like life only because actors are alive. In the cinema, when you photograph somebody, you kill him on film. It’s dead images. Projecting a film is projecting people killed. But there is a certain way of doing it so that the images are transformed by their contact together. Then life comes into it, like flowers reviving in water.
  • Q: What do you think of Tolstoy?
    A: In comparison I find him very dry. He works much more from the outside than from the inside. With Dostoevsky you feel “I’m sure you don’t make mistakes about human beings.” That’s what I’m looking for—to remain on the inside.

Click on the link in the title for the full interview.


Posted 7 months ago

Permalink

Interview Notes - Michael Haneke (Film Comment) (link)

I was very taken by Haneke’s The White Ribbon (2009) when I saw it the other day. I loved its formal grandness, its glacial, seasonal pacing, its protestant restraint in nearly everything. Here are some quotes from an interview with him:

  • Q: Except for a brief and vague remark at the beginning, the narrator does not reflect on anything beyond this one story and these local characters. And his last words are: “I never saw any of them ever again.” The paradoxical effect, of course, is that we immediately start to think of where and when we might have encountered them in other shapes—throughout history or in our own lives. This is a good example of your double strategy to leave some things open but also leave enough traces for substantial interpretation.
    A: I always look for the places in a story where leaving things open can become really productive for the viewer. I often compare filmmaking with building a ski jump; the actual jumping should be done by the audience. For the filmmaker, this is pretty hard—it’s much easier to do the jump yourself, to do it for the viewer. Because there’s always the fear of frustrating them. What do I have to indicate? What do I leave out? How much can I not spell out when constructing a film and still not frustrate the audience? Such strategies have become widely accepted in modern literature, but much less so in cinema. That’s a bit sad.
  • On there being nuanced, rich characters in the film: “To me there are no completely positive or negative characters in the film. The pastor is not evil either, he’s really convinced of what he does. He really loves his children. That’s the horror of it. It was normal to beat one’s kids. When he tells them, “I won’t sleep tonight, because tomorrow I will have to hurt you,” it sounds cynical to our ears, but I think it’s better to believe him. It’s not very interesting to see him as a sadist or as a grotesque mental case. If these people had just been perverts, this kind of behavior wouldn’t have had such broad effects. And I’m not sure if any other system of education is inherently better. It’s always about the individual pedagogical impulse: do you do something just to exert your authority, or to help the other person find his or her way in society—as shitty as society may be. Each educational system is only as good as the person who acts in it. “
  • On the role of a director: “I had a fantastic crew—Christoph Kanter, my art director who I’ve been working with for ages, Moidele Bickel, the costume designer, whom I hired because she had done the costumes for Queen Margot—the best I’ve seen in cinema. She’s a master in creating the necessary patina, clothes that look truly worn. I don’t think a director needs to be proficient in all these crafts, cinematography, set design, etc., but he needs the ability to quickly perceive all details and proportions and see if something is wrong.”
  • A very different method to the messier, impromptu methods of Wong Kar Wai, and Antonioni: 
    Q: Are your films still storyboarded throughout? I wonder if certain strong images—like the crucified bird—are already present in the script rather than “found” while making the film.
    A: In general, I draw the storyboards after I’ve decided on the locations. But images like the one with the bird are always in the script. I don’t believe in fortuitous events on the set, except in relation to the actors’ work. I never trust “symbolic” things that happen by chance while shooting. They sometimes appear like sudden “proposals,” but usually I cannot judge in that exact moment what it would mean for the whole film if I were to include them. I did that twice in my career, and in the end I cut them out. You may find it great that very second, but it’s usually wrong in some other way. I pretty much follow the script 100 percent.
  • Goethe: “I have never heard of any crime which I might not have committed.”
  • Q: … Can you describe why genre traditions hold very little appeal for you, even though, as in the case of Funny Games or Caché, the points of contact are sometimes obvious?
    A: Points of contact is the correct expression, because I do use genre—both films you mention are thrillers in a certain way. But generally, what bores me in genre cinema is the sort of abstraction or de-realization of reality that takes place there. It bores me as a viewer, not as a filmmaker. It’s like in the theater, in cases such as Ionesco or Gombrowicz: when the world is reduced to a model, I lose interest after five minutes, because I know right away what it will boil down to. I also try to build models in my films, but ones that are “filled with the world,” where the effect is not just metaphorical but steeped in a verifiable reality. And most film genres—apart from the thriller—don’t do that for me. They offer prototypical modes of behavior that only interest me if I can reflect them as a filmmaker.
  • Q: I came upon something from Pascal, who is one of your gurus. It’s from the Pensées: “We do not content ourselves with the life we have in ourselves and in our own being; we desire to live an imaginary life in the mind of others, and for this purpose we endeavour to shine.” I had to think of Cannes, where you’ve been a regular, and of your recent Palme d’Or—the whole glamour and fame aspect of cinema. It’s not something you seem made for, but maybe even you desire to live this “imaginary life in the mind of others.”
    A: Look, this is a truly happy moment in my life. We are all social beings, and we strive for some appreciation by others. If your work is the center of your existence, it’s great to be recognized for it. You don’t do all this for yourself, you want to communicate. First and foremost, you may actually do it for your own pleasure, because you like to do it, but this energy will stall if you find no response or success. What makes me happy about the Palme d’Or is definitely not the glamour that goes with it but that it’s the optimal form of recognition in my métier. The work should shine—it’s what I go public with. As a person, I’d rather have my peace and quiet.

Click on the title to read the article.


Posted 7 months ago

Permalink

Vanguard Interview Shoot Notes

I was hired (payment terms still to be confirmed) to shoot a band interview and some live performances at the Vanguard that would go up on their website. It was something different and I was very interested to see how the camera (and I) would go in a live situation like that.

Interview Planning

I didn’t know too much about the shoot before-hand. It wouldn’t have made a huge difference to how I would have gone about things in this case. I had the equipment that I had. I did ask whether there were some lights available and I should have known that even when the answer is yes, the answer really is no. It is never the right kind, or enough. Wesley lent me a key light but it was missing a diffuser. He also gave me some good tips in terms of really concentrating on the sound as the key to interviews. Although I had the sense to bring a pair of headphones with me, I didn’t have enough sense to make those closed, sound-cancelling cans, which is what you actually need.

Interview Setup

I arrived an hour and a half early, and that was a good thing because it took that long to get things looking right. The band room was a bit of a mess of stuff but there was a very interesting gold plated wall and a nice deep red on the other wall in that corner.

I tested the light that I had bought and it was nice and bright (too bright without the diffusor) and a nice tungsten colour. Good, at least everything could be seen. I set up the camera to point at the corner and set up the audio recorder.

Then we got down to moving a big piano out of the corner and thinking about what could be used as seats. Originally I was thinking about the couch but it was way too large and a hideous green. There was a shabby looking bench covered in a zebra print and a straight wood back which would work well with two people on it and then we needed something for the interview. In another room I found another of the same bench but also an inflatable yellow horse. Yup, we went with that.

The floor was vacuumed and things positioned and it was looking good. There was another light there that I tried to use as a hair light but it was too strong and it looked daylight balanced and made things look very funny. Decided to go with one light.

Next I tried out focusing, positioning a model in all the positions and the DOF covered everyone well. The zoom function at 10x magnification worked very well for getting focus

The problem was composition. There wasn’t much room to move back and still have a clean frame (doorways and other junk gatecrashed) so I was fairly close, the problem was that I had to cut off the legs to get the headroom in. In the end I lowered the sticks and managed to get everything in. The performers bought in their own guiters and really filled out the frame which I wasn’t even thinking about. It looked good.

I recorded some test video and transferred it to the notebook to have a look. It looked good. Especially the colours.

Next I tested the sound and very quickly realised the hopelessness of trying to monitor with open cans. Really need closed, even sound-cancelling headphones with the volume turned up higher to monitor independent of the real sound in the room compared to the monitor output. This is a crucial purchase.

Ok, everything was now ready and we were short of time as the performers had to do sound checks and the interviewer had to leave at a certain time.

We got going.

Interview Recording

Everything functioned pretty well at the beginning except sound monitoring and consequently the sound was a little low especially for one of the artists who was a little quieter than the others.

The light really did look harsh I thought. But that’s better than too little light.

The big problem occurred because of the heat in the room created by the big light and lack of ventilation etc. etc. The camera started overheating at around 7 minutes but kept on working. At around 10 minutes I asked the interviewer and performers to stop and that we’d need a minute. The moment passed pretty quickly but it wasn’t the most professional bit. One of the performers mentioned the continuity issues that would result from him drinking the wine. I realised this was actually a problem and how I was going to edit things together now with the break and not make it look cheesy and amateur.

The interview lasted just over 20 minutes and I didn’t have to shut things down. It visuals took up about 7 gigs. My battery was down to two bars (I didn’t start from full) I really need two batteries to do this kind of work.

Doing visuals and separate sound is a hard task for one person.

Concert Footage

An hour later I moved downstairs to film from the mezzanine levels the actual performances. I started late because I was talking to an old friend I hand’t seen for awhile.

The light levels were very low and I had to push up to 3200 ISO. which wasn’t actually that much of a problem. The other thing I unfortunately had to do was go down to a shutter speed of 60 when I was shooting 1280x720 50p. I should have been at 100. It resulted in some seriously unnatural movement. I’m not sure why the camera let me go down only to that. I also had to shoot at 2.8 and it resulted a pretty narrow DOF even at the 20m distance I was from the stage. Focus wasn’t a big problem though.

The big problem was the battery running out over such a long period. Deciding what songs I actually wanted to shoot and running out of space on the two 16GB cards for the 3 hour set from three performers. Sound monitoring was also an issue.

Can’t use exposure compensation when on M and shooting video.

I was able to get a CD from the sound guy which should be far better quality that then the very hollow stuff that the recorder got.

Matching up all the disparate video and audio (sometimes I’d shut down video and leave audio on) is going to be a pain but not impossible. Better synchronicity between the two would be better for next time.

Pack up was efficient and I didn’t leave anything behind.

All in all, the work is pretty boring and doesn’t need much creativity at all. Will see if there is any payment involved. It was of course, excellent to try it. Not really the direction I want to go in. Main limitations were overheating, sound monitoring, battery, and card space.

I will be editing over the next couple of days and will write up that experience separately.


Posted 7 months ago

Interview - Cormac McCarthy on The Road - WSJ.com (link)

Cormac McCarthy sounds like a cantankerous sense maker. I imagine most people make sense and also cantankerous. Some good tidbits about filmmaking in here as well:

The Wall Street Journal: When you sell the rights to your books, do the contracts give you some oversight over the screenplay, or is it out of your hands?

Mr. McCarthy: No, you sell it and you go home and go to bed. You don’t embroil yourself in somebody else’s project.

WSJ: When you first went to the film set, how did it compare with how you saw “The Road” in your head?

CM: I guess my notion of what was going on in “The Road” did not include 60 to 80 people and a bunch of cameras. [Director] Dick Pearce and I made a film in North Carolina about 30 years ago and I thought, “This is just hell. Who would do this?” Instead, I get up and have a cup of coffee and wander around and read a little bit, sit down and type a few words and look out the window.

WSJ: But is there something compelling about the collaborative process compared to the solitary job of writing?

CM: Yes, it would compel you to avoid it at all costs.
…
WSJ: How does the notion of aging and death affect the work you do? Has it become more urgent?

CM: Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That’s heaven. That’s gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?

CM: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

WSJ: The last five years have seemed very productive for you. Have there been fallow periods in your writing?

CM: I don’t think there’s any rich period or fallow period. That’s just a perception you get from what’s published. Your busiest day might be watching some ants carrying bread crumbs. Someone asked Flannery O’Connor why she wrote, and she said, “Because I was good at it.” And I think that’s the right answer. If you’re good at something it’s very hard not to do it. In talking to older people who’ve had good lives, inevitably half of them will say, “The most significant thing in my life is that I’ve been extraordinarily lucky.” And when you hear that you know you’re hearing the truth. It doesn’t diminish their talent or industry. You can have all that and fail.
…
WSJ: You were born in Rhode Island and grew up in Tennessee. Why did you end up in the Southwest?

CM: I ended up in the Southwest because I knew that nobody had ever written about it. Besides Coca-Cola, the other thing that is universally known is cowboys and Indians. You can go to a mountain village in Mongolia and they’ll know about cowboys. But nobody had taken it seriously, not in 200 years. I thought, here’s a good subject. And it was.
…
JH: Be glad you didn’t have to sit through the assembly cut, which was four hours. Look, I’ve never made a film anywhere near two hours. I admire the films, back in the day, when they were 90 minutes.

CM: One school of thought says that directors shouldn’t be allowed to edit their own films. But the truth is they should be. And they should be really brutal. Really brutal.

JH: Viewers are being hardwired differently. In film, it’s harder and harder to use wide shots now. And the bigger the budget, the more closeups there are and the faster they change. It’s a whole different approach. What’s going to happen is there will be the two extremes: the franchise films that are now getting onto brands like Barbie, and Battleship and Ronald McDonald; then there are these incredible, very low-budget digital films. But that middle area, they just can’t sustain and make it work in the current model. Maybe the model will change and hopefully readjust.

CM: Well, I don’t know what of our culture is going to survive, or if we survive. If you look at the Greek plays, they’re really good. And there’s just a handful of them. Well, how good would they be if there were 2,500 of them? But that’s the future looking back at us. Anything you can think of, there’s going to be millions of them. Just the sheer number of things will devalue them. I don’t care whether it’s art, literature, poetry or drama, whatever. The sheer volume of it will wash it out. I mean, if you had thousands of Greek plays to read, would they be that good? I don’t think so.

JH: No, you’re absolutely right. Just as an example, the Toronto Film Festival is one of the biggest in film festivals. They have made it, for the first time ever, much more difficult to submit a film. They charge an entry fee and they still had 4,000 submissions just this year and they boiled that down to 300.
…
WSJ: Do you feel like you’re trying to address the same big questions in all your work, but just in different ways?

CM: Creative work is often driven by pain. It may be that if you don’t have something in the back of your head driving you nuts, you may not do anything. It’s not a good arrangement. If I were God, I wouldn’t have done it that way. Things I’ve written about are no longer of any interest to me, but they were certainly of interest before I wrote about them. So there’s something about writing about it that flattens them. You’ve used them up. I tell people I’ve never read one of my books, and that’s true. They think I’m pulling their leg.

I didn’t know the director of The Road was Australian, but he is.

(Click the link in the title.)


Posted 8 months ago

Permalink

© Adnan Chowdhury 2009