Filmwell’s Book of Filmmaker Wisdom, Excerpt 12: Charlie Kaufman
“The story can only be told in a particular form. It can’t be told in a painting. The point is: it’s very important that what you do is specific to the medium in which you’re doing it, and that you utilise what is specific about that medium to do the work. And if you can’t think about why it should be done this way, then it doesn’t need to be done.” - Charlie Kaufman on writing Read More
Filmwell’s Book of Filmmaker Wisdom, Excerpt 11: The Dardenne Brothers
Cineaste: Why are there so many silences and so little dialog in your films? Jean-Pierre Dardenne: In fact, The Son is a film about the difficulty of speaking…. We are more interested in trying to give meaning to a scene by the way we film the relations between the characters’ bodies and what gestures a character makes—how he passes a cup to someone else, how he pours coffee into his cup. This is more interesting than presenting actions as pretexts for talking. Words... Read More
Filmwell’s Book of Filmmaker Wisdom, Excerpt 10: Bresson
From Notes on the Cinematographer: Accustom the public to divining the whole of which they are given only a part. Make people diviners. Make them desire it. Be as ignorant of what you are going to catch as is a fisherman of what is at the end of his fishing rod. (The fish that arises from nowhere.) A highly compressed film will not yield its best at the first go. People see in it at first what seems like something they have seen before. Hostility to art is also hostility to the... Read More
Filmwell’s Book of Filmmaker Wisdom – Excerpt 9: Bresson
“Models. What they lose in apparent prominence during the shooting, they gain in depth and truth on the screen. It is the flattest and dullest parts that have in the end the most life.” - Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer Read More
Filmwell’s Book of Filmmaker Wisdom – Excerpt 8: Greenaway
“I suppose, my general sense of anxiety and disquiet about the cinema we’ve got after 100 years — a cinema which is predicated on text. So whether your name is Spielberg or Scorsese or Godard, there’s always a necessity to start with text and finish with image. I don’t think that’s particularly where we should organize an autonomous art form. That’s why I think that, in a way, we haven’t seen the cinema yet, all we’ve seen is 100 years of illustrated text. My... Read More
Filmwell’s Book of Filmmaker Wisdom: Excerpt 6 – Orson Welles
Orson Welles: I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That’s what gives the theater meaning: when it becomes a social act. Read More
Filmwell’s Book of Filmmaker Wisdom: Excerpt 5 – Miyazaki
From a 2005 interview with Xan Brooks for the Western release of Howl’s Moving Castle: Personally I am very pessimistic… But when, for instance, one of my staff has a baby you can’t help but bless them for a good future. Because I can’t tell that child, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have come into this life.’ And yet I know the world is heading in a bad direction. So with those conflicting thoughts in mind, I think about what kind of films I should... Read More
Filmwell’s Book of Filmmaker Wisdom: Excerpt 4 – Tarkovsky
From Sculpting in Time by Andrei Tarkovsky: I think that one of the saddest aspects of our time is the total destruction in people’s awareness of all that goes with a conscious sense of the beautiful. Modern mass culture, aimed at the ‘consumer’, the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people’s souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being. But the artist cannot... Read More
Filmwell’s Book of Filmmaker Wisdom: Excerpt 3 – Kiarostami
From Abbas Kiarostami, “10 On Ten” I don’t believe the job of a filmmaker is to excite or move the viewer merely through creating special moments. By simply showing the reality, one can make people think about their own and other people’s acts or behaviour, and see and accept reality as it is. It’s from this point that the viewer’s duty to complete a work or a film begins. The viewer must be enticed into reflection on himself and the surrounding world. The... Read More
Filmwell’s Book of Filmmaker Wisdom: Excerpt 2 – Godard
David Dark (author of recently reviewed Sacredness of Questioning Everything) slapped up a clip from Vivre sa vie over at his blog Peer Pressure Is Forever. And it compelled me to do the same here: There is a very fine line between Godard the ad hoc blowhard intellectualese grammarian, and Godard the conjuror of incisively modern spiritual epithets. In this clip, we find him in the latter form. Read More
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