ARGO INTERVIEW
Here’s what Argo‘s Ben Affleck had to say about
respecting history, why he prefers using effects as the film’s score, and how a
camera can be more powerful than a rifle:
You basically combined two different movies with
two completely different tones in this film, with representatives from both
[tones] here. How did you talk to them about what you were looking for and how
did you put them together so skilfully?
Affleck: Well, I
wish I could say it was my skill. I didn’t really talk to them much about
anything. They’re really smart actors, looked at the material on the page, and
did me the favor of playing it honestly. Realistically, it kind of blended. If
it hadn’t, I suppose we would’ve had conversations of how we were going to get
the jigsaw puzzles to fit. All the parties — Bryan, John, and Alan [Arkin] —
were pretty adept. They knew how to play it real, and that kind of saved my
bacon.
It really seemed as if you shot Argo as if it was made in
the 70s, starting with the old Warner Bros. logo. Was that your intention?
Affleck: Yeah, I
thought it’d be, sort of, a trick of the brain. If you’re looking at a movie
that looks like it was made in the 1970s, it’s more easy for the brain to
subconsciously accept the events they’re watching are taking place during that
period. Now, you can’t do that if you’re doing a movie about the revolutionary
war. We had an interesting advantage: the era I was trying to replicate was a
really great era for filmmaking. I got to copy these really great filmmakers:
Sidney Lumet, Scorsese, and so on.
When you’re making a film that’s basically a living
history film, is there an extra level of responsibility, both as actors and as
a director? Does that complicate things or make it more interesting?
Goodman: First and
foremost, I had a responsibility to the character I was playing, because he
actuall existed. He was a well-respected makeup artist and CIA operative. I
felt the responsibility to not step on my foot.
Affleck: For me,
yeah, it is about the whole story. You have to maintain the integrity and the
honesty of the spine of the story. That’s one profound responsibility, because
when Rocky Sickman sees that takeover, I want him to say,
“Yeah, that’s basically it.” Now, the real takeover was four hours long, but we
have it as five minutes. That’s the kind of compromise you have to make. The
essential spirit of it has to be preserved. Someone did find a picture of
[Ruholla] Khomeini with darts on it and said, “Who did this?” I also have the
responsibility to make a good movie and to tell a good story, because that’s
what I do. Those two things are constantly in tension with each other. I want
to make it true, but I got to make it good.
Cranston: My character was a composite character, and
I think it was carefully crafted that way. I think in the time you keep cutting
back to the CIA, it was important not to have the audience confused for a
second. If there was numerous people at the CIA giving him guidance, then
they’d say, “Which one’s which?” If that happens, then we’re in trouble, because
they’re not listening. We didn’t want to slow it down, so my character became a
composit character. It’s interesting, some people will say, “Actors are liars.
They get up and pretend.” The truth is, we desperately seek the truth and the
honesty of the character. We don’t feel completely comfortable until we find
out how to play someone with that integrity. I think these two [Goodman and
Affleck] had slightly more sense of responsibility, because they’re portraying
real people.
Mr. Affleck, before making Argo you said you watched
some of the greatest movies of all time. What were some films you didn’t expect
to take inspiration from which, in the end, you did?
Affleck: There was
a lot of them that I had seen, but I watched them again. I liked The
Thing, for my hair. I liked John Cassavete‘s Killing
of a Chinese Bookie, for the seedy LA. I loved the look, the feel,
the way they used zooms, and it felt raw but choreographed, which I didn’t see
coming. There’s a movie called Let Me In, which I
watched. A guy named Matt Reeves did it, and it’s a remake. I
thought it was really well directed. I watched it with my DP, and we were
looking at the stuff they did with focus and keeping things in the foreground
and softer in the background. That was something I didn’t expect to influence
me, but did.
Watching this movie reminded me of my generation,
and it felt like an homage with all the clothes and Walter Cronkite. Was that
something that attracted you to the movie?
Affleck: I’m the
age of the kid in the movie, so I definitely identified with the child and with
the father. When I went into that room and saw all the action figures, Star
Wars and stuff, it really hit me: this is my childhood. I
got really fastidious about sheets and everything. Everyone was, like, “What’s going
on here?”
There’s something remarkably innocent about that era. We
think of the 70s as being slightly debauched, with key parties and all these
sort of images we get from other movies, but they had none of that technology.
You know, people on television had these crummy sets, but now we got a theme
song and a graphic for every story. There were these gigantic cars that
probably got six miles to the gallon. There was something kind of sweet about
it. Sweet about the answering machine. You just leave the house, and that’s it.
No one can find you until you come home. Put a quarter – or a dime – in the
phone slot. I found something sweet about it. I discovered more about it.
Can you talk about the choice when to use music and
when not to use music? Like, in the embassy takeover, you just used the audio.
And how did you use the score to separate the tonal structure?
Affleck: Most of
the time I don’t like music in movies. It usually feels artificial and false.
Like, all the sudden the orchestra drops, and it takes me out [of the movie].
All of my movies I’ve tried to start late with music, with letting it build and
creep in around the edges, so you don’t realize there’s all this music in it. I
used source for some of the LA stuff. Like, I used “Dance the Night Away,”
which would root you in the period. In Iran America Iran
I do like to use effects as score, with the chanting or the
banging against the gates. It’s finding ways to punctuate it to let it go away
and bring it up, like you’re score it, but with realistic sounds. Using the
banging on the roof is really fun and interesting, and I prefer to do it dry
there. I would argue with the editors wanting to do it dry all the way through,
but I got talked into it.
The movie reminded me of when, after 9/11, a bunch
of screenwriters were brought in to come up with scenarios. Can you talk about
the symbiotic relationship between Hollywood
Affleck: Yeah,
they brought a bunch of screenwriters in and I said, “Wait, we’ve heard all
these ideas before!” [Laughs] That is a good parallel, and there is a symbiotic
relationship. People make movies about military. When you go on a tour with the
military all these guys are movie buffs. Movies are a big part of our culture.
The military, the movies, and our intelligence services are inventing things.
For movies, it’s for art and entertainment. For intelligence services, it’s for
God knows what. That’s one of the themes of this story: the power of
storytelling, whether it’s political theater, relating to our children, or
trying to get people out of danger. Telling stories is incredibly powerful.
There’s a shot I really like where there’s this firing squad, then you go to
this read through, and then there’s a firearm, a rifle, and a camera. Hopefully
this is subtle, but that suggests the camera is more powerful than the gun. I
think that’s been really warn out with the Youtube era.
The movie feels like a very efficient man on a
mission story. From a storytelling standpoint, did you just want Tony as a
simple guy trying to do his job, not someone out to prove anything?
Affleck: I think
Tony was a guy who, yeah, if he got his orders, he’d do his mission and follow
through. He was rather uncomplicated. He had a certain amount of fear, but he
was going to do it. As a result, the story is a little wonky in the film,
because it’s really about the six people. If you want to talk about where your
empathy is or what line you’re pulling through the story, it’s the six people,
not the guy on a horse who’s going to kill saxons or whatever. You start to get
developed more emotionally with these other characters, like Bryan and John. I
thought that was interesting, and it worked for Tony’s more slightly passive
personality. His focus was he’s going to save these people’s lives, so the
group became the center of the wheel.
What Francis Ford Coppola Can Teach Us About Writing Compelling White
Papers
If someone pressed you, could you clearly state the core argument of
your white paper in 30 seconds or less?
Michael Bay Interview
Having done two
movies, I see commercials in a new light. There is so much bullshit and
interference, so much red tape and the freedom of creativity is held back far
too often. When you’re the director of a movie, it’s your movie yet on a
commercial you’re working for someone who can ultimately do whatever they want
with your footage. There’s still a lot of politics in movies, but creatively,
they don’t screw you up that much.
I think feature
directors have a much harder time coming to commercials than the other way
round. Advertising is so specific, you have to use and construct shots so
differently. I like the economy of the format, the immediacy you get with fast
cutting. Each second is so precious, so you learn to convey an amazing amount
of information in a short space of time — which helped on my first movie “Bad
Boys.’
Throughout my commercials career I have always been
angling towards movies, trying to create movie-style scenarios. That was always
my grand plan — and I was very open about it. At film school I sensed that
advertising would be a great training ground. I wanted to do action, I wanted
to do character stuff, I wanted to do comedy, I wanted to tell stories, I
wanted to do cool images — anything to broaden my horizon. Compare being a
commercials director with a film director — you get so many more chances,
you’re at such an advantage if you’re a young guy. I shot so many different
scenarios and ran so many different crews — and all that made me so much more
competitive.
I
think its dangerous though when some commercial directors are wooed by
Hollywood studios before their time. Its best to serve an apprenticeship. I was
offered movies for many years but I kept holding back, because I wanted to get
really good at what I was doing.
I
demand a lot of freedom. There was a time when I was really nervous about
conference calls, but now I treat them like a piece of theatre. I really
probe the creatives – I ask a lot of questions, suss their client out, see
where they’re all headed. I’d rather
say no to a great script than be their prisoner
Bay rolls his eyes when asked to comment on his Internet critics.
“There are only about 50 people on the Internet,” he says. “If you
look at their names, same people, same names. They don’t seem like they really
get into movies. A couple of them are smart, but some are just they seem like
they hate the world.”
Bay notes that he
always shoots a movie in his head before he ever gets on a set.
“What I do is, I sit
in a room and I write images on a computer and I go through the scene over
and over,” he explains. “I’ll pick a song or certain music that I feel will
help stimulate me, and I’ll just sit in a room and I try to space out and
picture the whole movie or scene in my head. It’s a long process, but that’s
where I come up with my ideas.
“I always
try to find different angles, give the audience privileged angles,” he
continues. In “Pearl Harbor,” for instance, Bay said he envisioned the
audience underwater looking up at sailors treading water and the image of an
American flag floating down among their feet.
“It’s the same thing I
came up with in the Arizona bomb-falling shot,” he adds. “You know it’s one
of the seminal events in that attack, but how are you going to do that? I
knew it fell from 10,000 feet and I knew they feel it went four stories
through into the magazine room. And what are you going to do? You’re going to
blow up a ship, but how do you do it to make it a special moment?”
Bay said he awoke at 3
in the morning, scribbled down his thoughts, then went into the office the
next day and met with his visual effects experts. Using a satellite image of
Pearl Harbor and digitally created battleships and planes, he was able to
create these epic shots in his office.
“I was prepping this
movie before Randall had a script,” Bay says. ” What I would do, I would keep
feeding Randall these images and things I knew we were able to capture on
film, and he kept incorporating them into the script.”
The
problem of verifying all these survivor stories, Bay acknowledged, was that
you sometimes just have to take people at their word because they were there.
Q: When you begin a
scene, how do you play it in your head? Is your vision planned from the
beginning or does it come later?
MB: When I work on a
script, I start jotting down all my ideas. I get a lot of scrap – magazine
pictures – anything to inspire me. I listen to a lot of music. I’ll normally
narrow the movie down to 4 or 5 cds. Where I listen to certain music for
certain scenes, and I see those scenes in my head. I start playing the movie
in my head. The music helps inspires me those scenes. Like on Armageddon, I
used the scores of Braveheart, The Last of the Mohicans, Crimson Tide, and
The Rock for some of the inspiration, for some of the scenes. I really
pre-visualize all the movie in my head. And when I’m on the set, I really
like working with the actors in helping it make it better.

Q: Very different from
James Cameron. Very different…
MB: I was about to ask
“how does he come about it?
Q: On t he
particular interview I read, his method of inspiration is very different than
your. He writes his ideas and details on the script itself. ‘Till the point –
if you were to read it – it would be hard to find the dialogue amid all the
scribble and writing.
MB: Yeah, his scripts
are extremely conscious. He calls them “scriptments” So he writes down all
the detail.
Q: Is it true that
you hold back the actual “film construction” until the editing process
begins?
MB: No, I actually
have editors that work along side. They’re taking my film,and I’m giving them
storyboards. And then I like too see what they come up with from what I
shoot. I shoot a lot of film…I’m a pretty quick shooter. I like to improvise
certain things. And then I like to see what the editors come up with. It
gives me a whole new fresh look at what we did. And then I tweak it from
there. A lot of times I’ll edit the stuff in my head before I shoot so I know
what I’m looking for.
Q: When a chunk hits the space shuttle’s window while it’s flying between the
asteroid’s debris, from that moment on, I counted 13 cuts in less than 2
seconds.
MB:
(laughs)
Q: Lot of cuts Michael. Do you improvise in the editing room?
MB:Well,
you can never get every single shot, ’cause you don’t know what’s gonna make
it exciting to he music for instance. But that was a pretty planned out
scene. There’s so much crap going on that scene.
Q: I had a very ultra-orthodox film studies teacher…
MB:
Like how?
Q: Well, to begin with, she was very snobbish. And she ragged on how cinematic
codes and rules are being broken, and the usual blah-blah-blah given to film
students. She also praised “Citizen Kane” day and night and said the usual
stuff about it being the greatest movie of all time, etc. And how the movies
have lost their true purpose, become too commercial. You know, all the stuff
taught to film students here in New England.
MB: What you need to
tell her from a very big director is that there are no rules in film. And any
film teacher that teaches rules is wrong. “Citizen Kane,” when it came out,
it was very mocked film. People did not like it. It was very unrespected. It
was thought of at the time as very uncool. But he wasn’t the inventor of all
that stuff. All that stuff had been done in other movies. through silent
movies, through musicals, yadda-yadda-yadda. But it was the first movie to
really put all those things together into a movie. If she would’ve taught
Orsen Wells, he would’ve laughed at her.
Kurosawa on Screenwriting
The photo is from Ran. Isn’t that
a fabulous image? Of all the directors in the history of cinema, I’d rank Akira Kurosawa somewhere at
the top of my list. One could argue persuasively that no filmmaker has created
more masterpieces than Kurosawa.
Patrick
Garson wrote, “Analysing any film by Akira Kurosawa is a joy. The sense of
care, placement and thought lying behind every shot is an unspoken guarantee
that nothing on screen is accidental.” I couldn’t agree more, as I had once
analyzed Ikiru,
which broke my heart.
We are also reminded by Dan
Harper that, “Despite his unarguable success, Kurosawa was, in fact, one of
the greatest risk-taking filmmakers in the history of international film (many
of those risks, I might add, didn’t pay off). Every one of his world-renowned
films was either preceded or followed by a film more experimental in form or
more difficult. You can even argue that some of his greatest successes (Rashomon, Ikiru, Seven Samurai)
were enormous risks for Kurosawa’s career – the ones that did pay
off…”
Kurosawa was, in fact, one of the greatest risk-taking filmmakers in
the history of international film.
Of course, Kurosawa was heavily involved in the screenwriting of his
films with a handful of writers he used throughout his career. So this begs the
question: what did the renowned risk-taker, ground-breaker, and
masterpiece-maker, have to say about screenwriting?
These quotes come to us from Akira Kurosawa’s book, Something
Like an Autobiography. Hope you enjoy them.
‘With a good script a good director can produce a
masterpiece; with the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film.
But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film. For
truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross
both fire and water. That is what makes a real movie. The script must be
something that has the power to do this.’
With a bad script
even a good director can’t possibly make a good film.
In order to write scripts, you must
first study the great novels and dramas of the world. You must consider why
they are great. Where does the emotion come from that you feel as you read
them? What degree of passion did the author have to have, what level of
meticulousness did he have to command, in order to portray the characters and
events as he did? You must read thoroughly, to the point where you can grasp
all these things.
You must also see the great films. You must read the great
screenplays and study the film theories of the great directors. If your goal is
to become a film director, you must master screenwriting.’
‘A
good structure for a screenplay is that of the symphony, with its three or four
movements and differing tempos. Or one can use the Noh play with its three-part
structure: jo (introduction), ha (destruction) and kyu (haste). If you devote
yourself fully to Noh and gain something good from this, it will emerge
naturally in your films.
A good structure for a screenplay is that of the symphony, with its
three or four movements and differing tempos.
The Noh is a truly unique art form that exists nowhere else in the
world. I think the Kabuki, which imitates it, is a sterile flower. But in a
screenplay, I think the symphonic structure is the easiest for the people of
today to understand.’
‘Something
that you should take particular notice of is the fact that the best scripts
have very few explanatory passages. Adding explanation to the descriptive
passages of a screenplay is the most dangerous trap you can fall into.
It’s easy to explain the psychological state of a character at a
particular moment, but it’s very difficult to describe it through the delicate
nuances of action and dialogue. Yet it is not impossible. A great deal about
this can be learned from the study of the great plays, and I believe the
“hard-boiled” detective novels can also be very instructive.’
‘I began writing scripts with two other people
around 1940. Up until then I wrote alone, and found that I had no difficulties.
But in writing alone there is a danger that your interpretation of another
human being will suffer from one-sidedness. If you write with two other people
about that human being, you get at least three different viewpoints on him, and
you can discuss the points on which you disagree. Also, the director has a
natural tendency to nudge the hero and the plot along into a pattern that is
the easiest one for him to direct. By writing with about two other people, you
can avoid this danger also.’
In writing alone
there is a danger that your interpretation of another human being
will suffer from one-sidedness.
‘I‘ve forgotten who it was that said creation is
memory. My own experiences and the various things I have read remain in my
memory and become the basis upon which I create something new. I couldn’t do it
out of nothing. For this reason, since the time I was a young man I have always
kept a notebook handy when I read a book.
I write down my reactions and what particularly moves me. I have
stacks and stacks of these college notebooks, and when I go off to write a
script, these are what I read. Somewhere they always provide me with a point of
breakthourgh. Even for single lines of dialogue I have taken hints from these
notebooks. So what I want to say is, don’t read books while lying down in bed.’
‘A novel and
a screenplay are entirely different things. The freedom for psychological
description one has in writing a novel is particularly difficult to adapt to a
screenplay without using narration.’
‘Characters in a film have their own existence. The
filmmaker has no freedom. If he insists on his authority and is allowed to
manipulate his characters like puppets, the film loses its vitality.’
‘At some point in the writing of every script I
feel like giving the whole thing up. From my many experiences of writing
screenplays, however, I have learned something: If I hold fast in the face of
this blankness and despair, adopting the tactic of Bodhidharma, the founder of
the Zen sect, who glared at the wall that stood in his way until his legs
became useless, a path will open up.’
‘Those
who say an assistant director’s job doesn’t allow him any free time for writing
are just cowards. Perhaps you can write only one page a day, but if you do it
every day, at the end of the year you’ll have 365 pages of script. I began in
this spirit, with a target of one page a day.
Perhaps you can
write only one page a day, but if you do it every day, at the end of the year you’ll
have 365 pages of script.
There was nothing I could do about the nights I had to work till
dawn, but when I had time to sleep, even after crawling into bed I would turn
out two or three pages. Oddly enough, when I put my mind to writing, it came
more easily than I had thought it would, and I wrote quite a few scripts.’
If someone pressed you, could you clearly state the core argument of
your white paper in 30 seconds or less?
What
about your paper’s audience-do you have a good grasp on their world?
Good
white paper writers spend some time thinking through these important questions
early in the writing process. They won’t even start writing until they can
clearly verbalize the paper’s core message. They also work hard to understand
the world their reader lives in. They want to know what drives them-what keeps
them up at night.
Just
as important, good writers know how to identify and avoid potential traps. They
know what pitfalls the paper must avoid to get noticed, get read and accomplish
its goal.
In
this way, a good white paper writer has a lot in common with a top-notch movie
director. I had always noticed a parallel between compelling direct mail copy
and engaging movies. But it wasn’t until I watched a behind-the-scenes
interview with Francis Ford Coppola, the accomplished movie director, that I
saw the similarities between writing white papers and directing movies.
First,
the prep work Coppola engaged in before shooting The Godfather is
mind-boggling. For instance, Coppola spent weeks creating a “promptbook” — a
large three-ring binder that contained the entire text from the Mario Puzo’s
book, The Godfather. He tore every page from the book and pasted each on
a single sheet of paper for note-taking, along with Coppola’s detailed notes
for each scene in the movie.
In
his promptbook, Coppola noted the key criteria every scene had to address. Two
of these were particularly important in helping to make the film engaging and
believable:
1.
The Core: Meaning the goal of the scene. The one message or idea the scene
absolutely had to communicate to the audience for it to have an impact.
2.
Pitfalls: Factors that could end up screwing up the scene in some way. This
included specific dangers to avoid, clichés to stay away from, and factors that
could make the scene boring to the audience.
To
illustrate the importance of these two criteria, Coppola refers to a key scene
in The Godfather titled “The Killing.” If you’ve seen the movie, this is
the scene where Solozzo, Michael Corleone (played by Al Pacino) and McCluskey,
the corrupt Police Captain, meet at a restaurant to strike up a deal between
the families. But Michael has other plans. His only reason for meeting these
guys is to kill them both, as revenge for Solozzo’s earlier attempt on
Michael’s father’s (Vito Corleone’s) life.
Reading
from his promptbook in the interview, Coppola felt the core of this scene was
“…to show the killing as terrifying and explicit as possible, having already
taken the tension to an unbearable degree.” And also, “to further define
Michael’s character in regards to his cool, totally calm execution of these
men.”
If
you’ve seen the movie, you have to agree he accomplished both objectives.
He
then describes the potential pitfalls: “This is a very important scene for the
movie and for Michael Corleone. Rushing the scene would absolutely ruin it!”
Again,
if you’ve seen The Godfather, you have to agree he dodged this pitfall.
Coppola rushes nothing in this scene. Yet it doesn’t feel long or boring. In
fact, this is probably one of the most suspenseful and memorable scenes in the
movie.
Coppola’s
understanding of the “core” and potential pitfalls for each scene is a big
reason why The Godfather is so engaging, so riveting, so authentic. In
fact, in the interview he tells us this was THE scene that convinced the
executives at Paramount Pictures to keep Al Pacino in Michael’s role.
Apparently, up until this point they didn’t think he was a good fit, and were
on the verge of firing him (against Coppola’s will).
As
marketers and writers, we can borrow these ideas to help us strengthen just
about every type of marketing message — especially white papers. Ask yourself:
What’s the “core?” What critical message must you convey? How do you want the
prospect to feel as he reads the piece? What do you want him to do when he
reads it?
Just
as important, what are the potential pitfalls? What could go wrong as the
prospect reads your message? What could cause him to distrust you, lose
interest or get confused, tossing your piece as a result?
Follow
Coppola’s lead. Think through each “scene” of your white paper. Make sure your
case is clear and compelling. Take the time to effectively address every potential
pitfall.
And
just as important, always remember to offer readers a next step at the end of
the paper. Or as Vito Corleone would put it, try to “make them an offer they
can’t refuse!”
Michael Bay Interview
Having done two
movies, I see commercials in a new light. There is so much bullshit and
interference, so much red tape and the freedom of creativity is held back far
too often. When you’re the director of a movie, it’s your movie yet on a
commercial you’re working for someone who can ultimately do whatever they want
with your footage. There’s still a lot of politics in movies, but creatively,
they don’t screw you up that much.
I think feature
directors have a much harder time coming to commercials than the other way
round. Advertising is so specific, you have to use and construct shots so
differently. I like the economy of the format, the immediacy you get with fast
cutting. Each second is so precious, so you learn to convey an amazing amount
of information in a short space of time — which helped on my first movie “Bad
Boys.’
Throughout my commercials career I have always been
angling towards movies, trying to create movie-style scenarios. That was always
my grand plan — and I was very open about it. At film school I sensed that
advertising would be a great training ground. I wanted to do action, I wanted
to do character stuff, I wanted to do comedy, I wanted to tell stories, I
wanted to do cool images — anything to broaden my horizon. Compare being a
commercials director with a film director — you get so many more chances,
you’re at such an advantage if you’re a young guy. I shot so many different
scenarios and ran so many different crews — and all that made me so much more
competitive.
I
think its dangerous though when some commercial directors are wooed by
Hollywood studios before their time. Its best to serve an apprenticeship. I was
offered movies for many years but I kept holding back, because I wanted to get
really good at what I was doing.
|
I
demand a lot of freedom. There was a time when I was really nervous about
conference calls, but now I treat them like a piece of theatre. I really
probe the creatives – I ask a lot of questions, suss their client out, see
where they’re all headed. I’d rather
say no to a great script than be their prisoner
|
Bay rolls his eyes when asked to comment on his Internet critics.
“There are only about 50 people on the Internet,” he says. “If you
look at their names, same people, same names. They don’t seem like they really
get into movies. A couple of them are smart, but some are just they seem like
they hate the world.”
Bay notes that he
always shoots a movie in his head before he ever gets on a set.
|
“What I do is, I sit
in a room and I write images on a computer and I go through the scene over
and over,” he explains. “I’ll pick a song or certain music that I feel will
help stimulate me, and I’ll just sit in a room and I try to space out and
picture the whole movie or scene in my head. It’s a long process, but that’s
where I come up with my ideas.
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“I always
try to find different angles, give the audience privileged angles,” he
continues. In “Pearl Harbor,” for instance, Bay said he envisioned the
audience underwater looking up at sailors treading water and the image of an
American flag floating down among their feet.
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“It’s the same thing I
came up with in the Arizona bomb-falling shot,” he adds. “You know it’s one
of the seminal events in that attack, but how are you going to do that? I
knew it fell from 10,000 feet and I knew they feel it went four stories
through into the magazine room. And what are you going to do? You’re going to
blow up a ship, but how do you do it to make it a special moment?”
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Bay said he awoke at 3
in the morning, scribbled down his thoughts, then went into the office the
next day and met with his visual effects experts. Using a satellite image of
Pearl Harbor and digitally created battleships and planes, he was able to
create these epic shots in his office.
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“I was prepping this
movie before Randall had a script,” Bay says. ” What I would do, I would keep
feeding Randall these images and things I knew we were able to capture on
film, and he kept incorporating them into the script.”
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The
problem of verifying all these survivor stories, Bay acknowledged, was that
you sometimes just have to take people at their word because they were there.
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Q: When you begin a
scene, how do you play it in your head? Is your vision planned from the
beginning or does it come later?
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MB: When I work on a
script, I start jotting down all my ideas. I get a lot of scrap – magazine
pictures – anything to inspire me. I listen to a lot of music. I’ll normally
narrow the movie down to 4 or 5 cds. Where I listen to certain music for
certain scenes, and I see those scenes in my head. I start playing the movie
in my head. The music helps inspires me those scenes. Like on Armageddon, I
used the scores of Braveheart, The Last of the Mohicans, Crimson Tide, and
The Rock for some of the inspiration, for some of the scenes. I really
pre-visualize all the movie in my head. And when I’m on the set, I really
like working with the actors in helping it make it better.
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Q: Very different from
James Cameron. Very different…
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MB: I was about to ask
“how does he come about it?
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Q: On t he
particular interview I read, his method of inspiration is very different than
your. He writes his ideas and details on the script itself. ‘Till the point –
if you were to read it – it would be hard to find the dialogue amid all the
scribble and writing.
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MB: Yeah, his scripts
are extremely conscious. He calls them “scriptments” So he writes down all
the detail.
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Q: Is it true that
you hold back the actual “film construction” until the editing process
begins?
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MB: No, I actually
have editors that work along side. They’re taking my film,and I’m giving them
storyboards. And then I like too see what they come up with from what I
shoot. I shoot a lot of film…I’m a pretty quick shooter. I like to improvise
certain things. And then I like to see what the editors come up with. It
gives me a whole new fresh look at what we did. And then I tweak it from
there. A lot of times I’ll edit the stuff in my head before I shoot so I know
what I’m looking for.
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Q: When a chunk hits the space shuttle’s window while it’s flying between the
asteroid’s debris, from that moment on, I counted 13 cuts in less than 2
seconds.
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MB:
(laughs)
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Q: Lot of cuts Michael. Do you improvise in the editing room?
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MB:Well,
you can never get every single shot, ’cause you don’t know what’s gonna make
it exciting to he music for instance. But that was a pretty planned out
scene. There’s so much crap going on that scene.
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Q: I had a very ultra-orthodox film studies teacher…
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MB:
Like how?
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Q: Well, to begin with, she was very snobbish. And she ragged on how cinematic
codes and rules are being broken, and the usual blah-blah-blah given to film
students. She also praised “Citizen Kane” day and night and said the usual
stuff about it being the greatest movie of all time, etc. And how the movies
have lost their true purpose, become too commercial. You know, all the stuff
taught to film students here in New England.
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MB: What you need to
tell her from a very big director is that there are no rules in film. And any
film teacher that teaches rules is wrong. “Citizen Kane,” when it came out,
it was very mocked film. People did not like it. It was very unrespected. It
was thought of at the time as very uncool. But he wasn’t the inventor of all
that stuff. All that stuff had been done in other movies. through silent
movies, through musicals, yadda-yadda-yadda. But it was the first movie to
really put all those things together into a movie. If she would’ve taught
Orsen Wells, he would’ve laughed at her.
Kurosawa on ScreenwritingThe photo is from Ran. Isn’t that a fabulous image? Of all the directors in the history of cinema, I’d rank Akira Kurosawa somewhere at the top of my list. One could argue persuasively that no filmmaker has created more masterpieces than Kurosawa.
Patrick
Garson wrote, “Analysing any film by Akira Kurosawa is a joy. The sense of
care, placement and thought lying behind every shot is an unspoken guarantee
that nothing on screen is accidental.” I couldn’t agree more, as I had once
analyzed Ikiru,
which broke my heart.
We are also reminded by Dan
Harper that, “Despite his unarguable success, Kurosawa was, in fact, one of
the greatest risk-taking filmmakers in the history of international film (many
of those risks, I might add, didn’t pay off). Every one of his world-renowned
films was either preceded or followed by a film more experimental in form or
more difficult. You can even argue that some of his greatest successes (Rashomon, Ikiru, Seven Samurai)
were enormous risks for Kurosawa’s career – the ones that did pay
off…”
Kurosawa was, in fact, one of the greatest risk-taking filmmakers in
the history of international film.
Of course, Kurosawa was heavily involved in the screenwriting of his
films with a handful of writers he used throughout his career. So this begs the
question: what did the renowned risk-taker, ground-breaker, and
masterpiece-maker, have to say about screenwriting?
These quotes come to us from Akira Kurosawa’s book, Something Like an Autobiography. Hope you enjoy them.
‘With a good script a good director can produce a
masterpiece; with the same script a mediocre director can make a passable film.
But with a bad script even a good director can’t possibly make a good film. For
truly cinematic expression, the camera and the microphone must be able to cross
both fire and water. That is what makes a real movie. The script must be
something that has the power to do this.’
With a bad script
even a good director can’t possibly make a good film.
In order to write scripts, you must
first study the great novels and dramas of the world. You must consider why
they are great. Where does the emotion come from that you feel as you read
them? What degree of passion did the author have to have, what level of
meticulousness did he have to command, in order to portray the characters and
events as he did? You must read thoroughly, to the point where you can grasp
all these things.
You must also see the great films. You must read the great
screenplays and study the film theories of the great directors. If your goal is
to become a film director, you must master screenwriting.’
‘A
good structure for a screenplay is that of the symphony, with its three or four
movements and differing tempos. Or one can use the Noh play with its three-part
structure: jo (introduction), ha (destruction) and kyu (haste). If you devote
yourself fully to Noh and gain something good from this, it will emerge
naturally in your films.
A good structure for a screenplay is that of the symphony, with its
three or four movements and differing tempos.
The Noh is a truly unique art form that exists nowhere else in the
world. I think the Kabuki, which imitates it, is a sterile flower. But in a
screenplay, I think the symphonic structure is the easiest for the people of
today to understand.’
‘Something
that you should take particular notice of is the fact that the best scripts
have very few explanatory passages. Adding explanation to the descriptive
passages of a screenplay is the most dangerous trap you can fall into.
It’s easy to explain the psychological state of a character at a
particular moment, but it’s very difficult to describe it through the delicate
nuances of action and dialogue. Yet it is not impossible. A great deal about
this can be learned from the study of the great plays, and I believe the
“hard-boiled” detective novels can also be very instructive.’
‘I began writing scripts with two other people
around 1940. Up until then I wrote alone, and found that I had no difficulties.
But in writing alone there is a danger that your interpretation of another
human being will suffer from one-sidedness. If you write with two other people
about that human being, you get at least three different viewpoints on him, and
you can discuss the points on which you disagree. Also, the director has a
natural tendency to nudge the hero and the plot along into a pattern that is
the easiest one for him to direct. By writing with about two other people, you
can avoid this danger also.’
In writing alone
there is a danger that your interpretation of another human being
will suffer from one-sidedness.
‘I‘ve forgotten who it was that said creation is
memory. My own experiences and the various things I have read remain in my
memory and become the basis upon which I create something new. I couldn’t do it
out of nothing. For this reason, since the time I was a young man I have always
kept a notebook handy when I read a book.
I write down my reactions and what particularly moves me. I have
stacks and stacks of these college notebooks, and when I go off to write a
script, these are what I read. Somewhere they always provide me with a point of
breakthourgh. Even for single lines of dialogue I have taken hints from these
notebooks. So what I want to say is, don’t read books while lying down in bed.’
‘A novel and
a screenplay are entirely different things. The freedom for psychological
description one has in writing a novel is particularly difficult to adapt to a
screenplay without using narration.’
‘Characters in a film have their own existence. The
filmmaker has no freedom. If he insists on his authority and is allowed to
manipulate his characters like puppets, the film loses its vitality.’
‘At some point in the writing of every script I
feel like giving the whole thing up. From my many experiences of writing
screenplays, however, I have learned something: If I hold fast in the face of
this blankness and despair, adopting the tactic of Bodhidharma, the founder of
the Zen sect, who glared at the wall that stood in his way until his legs
became useless, a path will open up.’
‘Those
who say an assistant director’s job doesn’t allow him any free time for writing
are just cowards. Perhaps you can write only one page a day, but if you do it
every day, at the end of the year you’ll have 365 pages of script. I began in
this spirit, with a target of one page a day.
Perhaps you can
write only one page a day, but if you do it every day, at the end of the year you’ll
have 365 pages of script.
There was nothing I could do about the nights I had to work till
dawn, but when I had time to sleep, even after crawling into bed I would turn
out two or three pages. Oddly enough, when I put my mind to writing, it came
more easily than I had thought it would, and I wrote quite a few scripts.’
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