Filmmaking Quote #35 (Les Blank)

“You go out and find some interesting people. You get to know them and film them, and you make something that says something about who they are; you learn to make movies that have some meaning.”
Filmmaker Les Blank (Burden of Dreams)
A Well Spent Life by Betsy Mclane
DGA Quarterly Spring 2012

Scott W. Smith

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Filmmaking Quote #34 (Ben Affleck)

“I was nobody auditioning, and then I was seen as this young, emerging talent, writer, Oscar winner (Good Will Hunting screenplay) — and then I was seen as this blockbuster actor, and then I was seen as this kind of train-wreck actor (RAZZIE Award winner, Worst Actor—Daredevil. Gigli, Paycheck) and then I was seen as this resurgent director. And now I think I’m kind of seen as just sort of somebody in Hollywood who works.”
Ben Affleck
A Snub by Oscars? Affleck Has an Answer by Melena Ryzik
NY Times January 16,2113

“I had no idea what I was doing. I stood out here. I was just a kid, and I never thought I’d be back here, and I am…What I learned was it doesn’t matter if you get knocked down in life, what matters is that you’ve got to get back up.”
Ben Affleck, producer/director/actor (Argo)
Best Picture (Argo), 2013 Oscar Acceptance Speech

Related posts:

Writing “Good Will Hunting”
Project Greenlight 2 (Part 1)
“Against the Wind”
Screenwriting Quote #141 (Melissa Rosenberg)
Filmmaking Quote #33 (Ken Burns)
Broken Wings & Silver Linings

Scott W. Smith

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Filmmaking Quote #33 (Ken Burns)

“I think filmmaking is obstacles. In fact, every film is a set of millions, literally—no egageration—millions of problems. But I use the word problems not so much pejoratively as if it’s just resistances, friction that you have to overcome. I’m fifty-six right now and have been making films for over 30 years—I don’t look fifty-six— you can imagine what I looked like when I started off. The first film I wanted to do was tell the story of the Brooklyn Bridge. So people would slam the door and say, ‘This child is trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge. No.’ And for many years I kept two thick binders, three-ring binders of literally hundreds of rejections. So I guess the biggest sort of outer resistance was just finding the money to be able to produce these films I wanted to produce.
Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns (The Dust Bowl, The Civil War, Baseball)
Big Think Interview

Scott W. Smith

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Filmmaking Quote #32 (Peter Bogdanovich)

“Auteurism today? Well, everybody thinks they’re an auteur. But nobody seems to understand what the whole auteur thing was. It wasn’t a theory as far as the French were concerned. It was a political statement called la politique des auteurs. Truffaut and Godard were attacking the old-fashioned, well-made film, French or American. They thought Howard Hawks was an infinitely better director than Fred Zinnemann. They thought Alfred Hitchcock was a greater director than David Lean. They were against Marcel Carné  and for Jean Renoir. Personal films were what they looking for, where a director’s personality dominated despite who wrote it or who was in it or who photographed it.”
Peter Bogdanovich
“Everybody thinks they’re an auteur” article by Vince Cosgrove
New York Daily News/March 2012

P.S. In the interview, Bogdanovich mentions that his favorite books about movies “include The Parade’s Gone By by Keven Brownlow, The American Cinema by Andrew Sarris, Adventures with D.W. Griffith by Karl Brown and Growing Up in Hollywood by Robert Parrish.

Scott W. Smith

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Filmmaking Quote #31 (Annie Mumolo)

“My token advice (to aspiring filmmakers) is do it—make your own stuff. Whether it’s short films or whatever you can do, my advice is make your own stuff. I’m a real believer in preparation meets opportunity. When this opportunity (to write Bridesmaids) came along I really had been at this a long time…I was really prepared when this came along. I’m just a firm believer in ‘just do it.’ If you build it, he will come.”
Annie Mumolo 
Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Bridesmaids
Script Mag Podcast with Jenna Milly 

P.S. About that “If you build it…”/Field of Dreams reference, all roads may not lead through Iowa— it just seems like it sometimes.

Related post: Filmmaking Quote #29 (Marc Maurino)

Another First Script = Oscar Nomination

Scott W. Smith

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Filmmaking Quote #30 (Martin Scorsese)

“I’m often asked by younger filmmakers, ‘Why do I need to look at old movies?’ I’ve made a number of pictures in the last 20 years and the response I have to give them is that I still consider myself a student. The more pictures I’ve made in 20 years, the more I realize I really don’t know. And I’m always looking for something or someone that I could learn from.  I tell the younger filmmakers, and the young students, that do it like painters used to do—that painters do—study the old masters, enrich your palette, expand the canvas. There’s always so much more to learn.”
Martin Scorsese
A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Movies (1995)

Part 1 on You Tube

Part 2 on You Tube

Part 3 on You Tube

Keep in mind that Scorsese’s comment about “always looking for something or someone that I could learn from” was said 30 years after he recieved an MFA from NYU.

Scott W. Smith

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“To Live or Die?”

“The best drama for me is one which shows a man in danger. There is no action when there is no danger. To live or die? What drama is greater?”
Howard Hawks*
Director— Scarface (1932), Sergent York, Rio Bravo, His Girl Friday, The Big Sleep
Interviews with Film Directors
Edited by Andrew Sarris

*Hawks was one of those directors that bridged the silent era with the talkies. He was born in Goshen, Indiana in 1896 and made his first film in 1926— The Road to Glory starring Carole Lombard. According to IMDB, that film is about “a woman who is blinded in an auto accident and relies on prayer to regain her sight”— so I’m not sure that fits Hawks’s above quote. But his Scarface fits the bill:

Last week I saw a contemporary version of the question “To live or die?”, The Grey, starring Liam Neeson and written by Joe Camahan and Ian Mackenzie Jeffers. The tag line is “LIVE OR DIE ON THIS DAY.” Intense stuff. 

P.S. Both Scarface and The Grey are great example of that great quote by Stanley Elkin, “I would never write about a character who is not at the end of his rope.” And one doesn’t have to be facing life or death to be at the end of their rope as Erin Brockovich and Winter’s Bone prove. (Though both of those female-driven films do have an element of life or death in them.)

Related posts:
What’s at Stake? (Tip #9)
Screenwriting Quote #132 (Kurosawa) —Howard Hawks was an influence on Kurosawa.

Scott W. Smith

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Filmmaking Quote #29 (Marc Maurino)

“Write 10 pages, get a video camera, shoot a master shot and a shot/reversal shot, and edit it in iMovie. When you’re done, you’ll see you didn’t need 10 pages to tell your story you told. You’ll cut it down to five pages, and be a better writer for it.”
Marc Maurino
Script magazine article by Zack Gutin

That’s the quote of the day. Here’s the story behind Marc Maurio and why you should listen to him.

Earlier this year he sold the first feature script he ever wrote (Inside the Machine) to CBS Films. But that doesn’t mean that was his first script. Maurino lives in Massachusetts where he’s made several short films with local actors and entered them in contest. He’s won some awards and along the way and he also went through the UCLA Professional Program in Screenwriting (an online program) where Inside the Machine was developed.

“I wrote my screenplay INSIDE THE MACHINE and submitted it to the IFP’s Emerging Narrative in May of 2010. Around July of 2010, I was chosen to come to Independent Film Week in New York in September, where IFP set up a bunch of meetings with producers, development executives, and literary managers, in hopes of helping to get my script off the ground. As my blogging from that week indicates, it was tremendous exposure to the industry, and I highly recommend it for any serious writer-director. But in the long run, no producers jumped on my script and said “let’s raise a few million and do it!”

However, one person I met—now my manager, at Circle of Confusion—called in October, and said he liked the script, and signed me. In December, he brought another manager out of his LA office onto my account. He also slipped my script to an agent at UTA, and I signed with two agents at UTA in January. Together, these four guys became my team.

In March, the team went out wide with my script, and very quickly sold it to a mini-major studio.”
Marc Maurino
Filmmaker magazine, Choosing Another Road Towards Directing 

Simple, right? All it took was 20 years. What took so long you ask?

“I’ve been hustling and planning and plotting and scheming and struggling and burning with desire to direct a feature for 20 years, and this script is the single best thing I’ve ever written. I’ve been making shorts, reading Filmmaker, doing workshops, working my tail off at my day job, raising kids, paying the mortgage—in some ways, I thought of this script as my golden goose. I had hoped I could ride it all the way to the director’s chair.”
Marc Maurino
Choosing Another Road Towards Directing 

Check out Marc’s website White Light Filmworks.

Scott W. Smith

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Filmmaking Quote #28 (Emotional Heart)

“Some of my main influences in the documentary world are Davis Guggenheim and Lesley Chicott, who taught me about finding the story and its emotional heart through the people (being filmed), and all of Earl Morris‘ films, which bring narrative form to the documentary.”
Logan Scheider
American Cinematographer magazine
November 2011

Scheider was the cinematographer on the beautifully shot PBS four-part documentary America in Primetime. (Here’s the official trailer I found online that for some reason is not only not HD, but is poorly compressed as well, so it doesn’t capture Scheider’s simple, yet complex lighting.)

Update: Found this short promo for America in Primetime on the PBS website but can only link to it rather than embed it here.

Related posts:

Emotional Screenwriting
Emotional Playwriting
Emotional Change (Tip #54) 

Scott W. Smith

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Filmmaking Quote #27 (Frank Capra)

“I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.”
3-time Oscar-winning director Frank Capra
You Can’t Take It With You, It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
(As well as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, and It’s a Wonderful Life)

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