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6 Filmmaking Tips From Lawrence Kasdan

by Scott Beggs

Don’t Forget Humor

“I want everything I do to have humor in it, because it seems to me that all of life has that. Even the most dire situation – sometimes those are the most close to hysteria …”

Comfort is the Death of Artistic Freedom

“You see, that’s the trap, becoming a slave to your lifestyle. Then you’ve given up the power. You can’t fight the power if you’ve given them the power. If that becomes your priority, which is understandable when people reach middle age, they become used to a very comfortable lifestyle that is enviable because you get to do work you like and then you’re well-remunerated for it. But when that becomes the priority, you’re dead meat as an artist, because you no longer control your destiny. The only way to control your destiny is to not need things…I’ve got as many weaknesses as anybody, but what I can’t buy is people complaining that they have to do this kind of work. Why do they have to? In Hollywood, I think you can make almost any kind of movie if you’re passionate about it.”

Be Prepared to Serve a Larger Vision

If you’re not planning on being an isolated auteur with 100% control.

It Doesn’t End After Graduation

“Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.”

You’ll Probably Have to Choose Between Personal Statements and Popularity

“Truffaut said that when what you’re interested in matches up with the public, it’s an accident. It’s so true. It’s all timing and gestalt. If you’ve had the luxury of expressing something personal, and no one goes, that’s not a shock. If it’s personal, and people go, that’s the shock.”

If Hollywood isn’t Speaking Your Language, Search Somewhere Else

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First Full ‘Upstream Color’ Trailer Looks Absolutely Gorgeous

by Scott Beggs

Completely shunning the typical mode of movie marketing where every secret and scene is revealed in the trailer, Shane Carruth has managed to make his follow-up to Primer seem even more mysterious the more he shows of it. Granted, the first teasers looked a bit too faux-poetic to take seriously, but the first full trailer is a wonder to behold.

Even though it shares maddeningly little (you can read a synopsis here), the imagery is stunning, and the selected scenes hint that there’s at least a palm worth of plot to this thing. This may seem like hyperbole, and it might simply be the trailer’s brainwashing talking, but if we praise Malick and Anderson for their abilities to craft this kind of emotional visuals, shouldn’t Carruth’s name be haunting the same halls? Sure, he hasn’t made many films, but if his name weren’t on this (and you knew nothing of it), wouldn’t you have guessed it was Malick’s signature?

Keep that in mind and check it out for yourself.

Upstream Color hits Sundance and the Berlinale before getting a limited release April 5th.

The Movie Star (1910 – 2012)

by Landon Palmer and Scott Beggs

As if answering our well-established hypothesis about Hollywood shutting down the production of genuine movie stars, the industry offered a positively scientific blitz of testing this year to challenge that assertion and ultimately prove it correct.

A Black Hole For Stars

The first true movie star was Florence Lawrence, the Canadian film actress who made 39 movies before her 22nd birthday and bloomed under D.W. Griffith’s direction at Biograph Studios. She and Mary Pickford became well loved by 1910, but Lawrence was the first to have her silent face connected with her full (stage) name. She became an icon that the studio could use as a sales tool to draw audiences. “You love Florence Lawrence? Well she’s in this one, so come see it!”

Oddly enough, silent film actors were barred from having their names publicized in the early days because producers were afraid their notability would lead to them asking for, you guessed it, more money. Those fears would be proven true throughout the next 9 decades to the delight of studios who realized those larger paychecks would be covered by the huge audience attendance brought on by the powerful gravity of the star. Evolving from a time when producers saw no need to give true credit to the people acting in the work,  the reason for building an actor’s public persona was to have a powerful advertising tool in their arsenal. Thus, it’s not that difficult to understand why creating stars has become so difficult: one actor’s name is no longer the most expeditious way to draw an audience. In fact, it might not even be that effective at all anymore…

The Character or the Actor?

…Formerly, the public persona was an extension of the star image. Now, it’s the public persona at the center of our experience of famous media figures, and this type of fame has no direct effect on who sees the actual work they do. In fact, some of today’s biggest celebrities have no cultural output at all. But fame seems to have lost any direct relationship to power over audiences in the world of entertainment. In other words, you can be famous and still be unable to entice people to come see you…

Read the whole article at Film School Rejects

6 Filmmaking Tips From Quentin Tarantino

by Scott Beggs

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…

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…

Good Artists Borrow, But Great Artists?

“I steal from every movie ever made.”

You Might Make Guitar Picks

Advice from this Comic-Con panel.

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.’”…

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

A Quentin Tarantino film has a number of signature touches, one of which involves the casting of oft-forgotten actors. In this excerpt from his feature chat, Quentin talks about how he makes his casting choices and how they influenced his decision to work with Leonardo DiCaprio.

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6 Filmmaking Tips From Peter Jackson

By Scott Beggs

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

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Silver Linings Playbook, The Master, and Quartet Screenplays For Your Consideration

by Christopher Boone

Finding the right tone in a screenplay is so important, and if the tone is inconsistent, a reader will likely want to pass on the script. Tone is a big reason why I’m excited to read David O. Russell’s screenplay for Silver Linings Playbook, adapted from Matthew Quick’s novel, as the story finds humor in incomfortable yet very human moments. The screenplay for The Master may illuminate certain elements of P.T. Anderson’s film, or may obfuscate it that much more, but will likely make an interesting read. And Quartet? Learning how to adapt a stage play into a screenplay from Oscar-winner Ronald Harwood (The Pianist) sounds pretty good to me.

Here are the links to the screenplays:

• Silver Linings Playbook, screenplay by David O. Russell, based on the novel by Matthew Quick
• The Master, written by Paul Thomas Anderson
• Quartet, written by Ronald Harwood, based on his play

As always, please use these screenplays for your educational purposes only, and don’t wait to download them as we never know when they will be taken offline. Several more screenplays available for legal download for your consideration can be found at the end of our previous post on award-contending screenplays.

Johnny Depp and Disney Are Hoping You Want a Modern Retelling of Don Quixote

by Nathan Adams

Let’s take a trip back in time to the magical year of 2010…Terry Gilliam was going to make a movie about Don Quixote starring Robert Duvall and Johnny Depp. A lot has changed since then. Ewan McGregor replaced Johnny Depp in Gilliam’s movie, then Gilliam’s movie got cancelled completely…

Even after all these years though, one thing hasn’t changed: Johnny Depp is still really into the character of Don Quixote. That’s why he’s teaming up with Disney to start developing a new feature film about Miguel de Cervantes’ creation. Deadline has the scoop that the untitled pitch has been shipped out for screenwriting duties to Steve Pink (Grosse Pointe Blank, High Fidelity) and Jeff Morris (The True Memoirs of an International Assassin). Little is known about the project at this point, but it’s said that it’s going to be a modern imagining of the Don Quixote story.

Seeing as he’s on as a producer, does that also mean that Depp will eventually be attached as an actor to play the title character? One can probably assume. So far Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is the only thing he’s got a producer’s credit on that wasn’t a starring vehicle for him as well. What do you think? Could Depp pull off playing the traveling romantic, trying to bring chivalry back to the world? Yeah, probably that’s not a stretch for him at all…

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by Simon Brew

One of cinema’s lost potential gems remains Terry Gilliam’s ambitious attempts to bring the Don Quixote story to the big screen. Gilliam’s struggles, which included beginning shooting before the production was shut down, were charted in the terrific, if melancholy documentary Lost In La Mancha. If you’ve not seen it, we can’t recommend it strongly enough.

Gilliam had cast Johnny Depp in his film, and it was to be a period take on the tale. And the director had always given the impression that he’d like to get the film moving again, if circumstances prevailed…

The question, then: will Terry Gilliam get the chance to direct this one? It’s too early on the project for news of a director, it seems, but it’d be pretty crappy after everything he went through last time around for Gilliam to not at least get a phone call.

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Johnny Depp Is Making His Don Quixote Film Without Terry Gilliam

by T.J. Barnard

Despite their decade-long struggle to get a film made out ofCervantes’ Don Quixote – a book whose scope and length has reduced many a patient reader to sobs and tears - Johnny Depp is apparently moving on without Terry Gilliam for an adaptation with Disney, presumably because he secretly wants Tim Burton to get involved instead. Yes, Depp’s own production company has partnered with the House of Mouse for a “modern-re-imagining” of the classic tale, a classic tale that will absolutely get the treatment it deserves through the hiring of Hot Tub Time Machine‘s Steve Pink as screenwriter.

Depp and Gilliam’s perilous attempt to transform Quixote cinematically can be glimpsed in 1997′s documentary Lost In La Mancha, in which Gilliam’s personal journey is contrasted with that of the novel’s titular character, despite the fact that funding and weather issues and elderly cast members prevent him from ever getting the thing made.

Perhaps fearful that Don Quixote will get made elsewhere if he doesn’t snap up the opportunity to film it at some point soon, the project also gives Johnny Depp another chance to dress up and talk in a funny voice, should he decide to cast himself in the movie. Don’t worry, Johnny… you go ahead and make this. It’s not like this is Terry Gilliam’s dream project or something.

(image via)

How Hollywood Melodrama Was Reborn with a Masculine Twist

By Landon Palmer

Twelve years ago, the western and the musical, two genres that were incredibly successful during Hollywood’s heyday, had been considered long dead with no hopes of a revival on the horizon. After all, why would either of these genres make a comeback? The western is a remnant of a sense of American cultural imperialism and pre-Howard Zinn history-writing long past, and the film musical requires such an astounding degree of suspension of disbelief that audiences who seek special effects that blur distinctions between the fabricated and the real simply aren’t willing to engage it.

But lo and behold, on December 25^th, 2012 (always a day for big movies), a western (Django Unchained) and a musical (Les Miserables) will be launched into wide release on the heels of outstanding buzz (sure, Tarantino’s film is a revisionist western, but since revisionist westerns have been around for nearly fifty years, let’s just refer to them as the current standard western, shall we?).

It’s difficult to say how this particular revival of these Hollywood genres has taken place. Of course, the unexpected success of previous films of these genres that took a risk with audiences (3:10 to Yuma and True Grit, Moulin Rouge and Chicago) certainly helps create the terrain for more such films, but this doesn’t necessarily explain why updated versions of classical Hollywood genres come back into style. Arguably, there are a multitude of genres we could use today, but unfortunately have no contemporary examples of. For instance, the ’30s and ’40s-style screwball romantic comedy could save the dire mess that the contemporary non-indie rom-com is in, but it’s nowhere to be seen. But another classical genre has seemed to disappear entirely; or, if it does still exist, it’s taken on a strange, almost unrecognizable new form: the Hollywood melodrama…

Continue reading at Film School Rejects. Really, go read this.