Techy Gizmos and Great Films

A recent article in The Vancouver Sun, about international film festivals like Toronto and Cannes, has a bunch of directors contemplating the end of the world as they know it (I might add, for those R.E. M. fans in the crowd  “and I feel fine…..”). The piece, entitled “Bending The Movie Genre In An Uncertain Time” quotes filmmakers like Paul Schrader and Jonathan Demme on the transition away from studio-oriented productions and into the scary world of indie values.

Perhaps director-writer Paul Schrader said it best when he described the motivation behind his latest film, Adam Resurrected, at the Toronto festival: “The well-made film is dead,” said the writer of Taxi Driver. “I knew it the minute I saw The Interpreter. It was a gorgeous, beautifully made from from Sydney Pollack - but there was something dead about it. It had no life at all.” Schrader was articulating a view shared by many other filmmakers who’ve watched their métier shift from an expensive and highly exclusive means of expression into a more populist and far more immediate experience thanks to the rise of digital tools.

I’m not sure that I understand writer Katherie Monk’s conclusion in the second sentence. Schrader seems to be talking about content, not technique. I don’t know how you feel, but I don’t see the relationship between soulless films and technology. I’ve been watching films since the 1960’s and the percentage of crap hasn’t seemed to have shifted But then she shifts over to Demme:

When the film had its North American premiere at the Toronto fest earlier this month, Demme said he wanted to give his tragic-comic wedding story a “home movie” feel, and for him, that meant ditching the awkward 35mm film cameras that can only record ten minutes of action before a magazine change, and exchanging them for the lightweight and highly mobile digital brand of camera that can record high-definition tape for an entire hour.

“I never thought I’d say this,” said Demme. “But I’ve lost my desire to work with film. I still worship film. and I hated making the original shift away from the flatbed to [an online digital editing machine called] Avid, but now the technology has reached a point where [digital] looks good. It’s not flat. You can light it. And now, I’m madly in love with it.”

She talks about Demme’s shooting style as it impacted actress Debra Winger’s sense of comfort –because Demme chose to shoot the film with a roving camera, the actress never was quite sure what was being captured and what not. Frankly, I understand her pain. It’s not easy trying to act real in the unreal world of filmmaking. Demme was trying to “listen in” on the real things that people do when there isn’t a camera around. That’s almost an impossibility — the presence of the camera changes everything. It’s the Brownian Movement writ large.

So what does this mean for editors?

I’m thinking about this because next Saturday, April 4th, I am giving a talk at the San Francisco Apple Store (it’s at 1pm at 1 Stockton St.)  about Creative Storytelling and my book, The Lean Forward Moment.  Now remember, this is San Francisco Apple Store.  San Francisco. That means that the quotient of tech-heads is liable to be much larger than at your typical Apple Store, and that’s already a higher percentage than at your typical Blockbuster, let’s say.

The decision, therefore, to talk about story as opposed to techy gizmos should be fun. I’ve written on my other blog, Hollyn-wood, about what happens when you pick up a camera which theoretically enables you to shoot unlimited amounts and footage. As an editor, I like more choices as opposed to fewer, of course. But it may surprise you to hear that I’m not at all convinced that unlimited choices makes for better films. In fact, I believe that shooting unlimited numbers of takes and set-ups, often comes from (and leads to) fuzzy thinking.

The Jonathan Demme quote above, worries me. It’s really hard work being an actor, especially when you’re working on the level of a Debra Winger. Not every actor works in the same way, but nearly all of them do not fully inhabit their characters 24 hours a day — on camera and off. It’s simply too bloody exhausting to stay in character the entire time. Most actors who I’ve worked with visibly change as soon as the director yells “Cut!”

As an aside, that transition from character back into person often provides some really interesting moments that are ripe for use in the final film. I often look for reaction shots in that footage, because their performances are often less guarded and sometimes less artificial than when they know the cameras are rolling. This doesn’t work in general, but it sometimes can provide some hidden gems.

That means that, in a world where the actors never know what is going to be used and what isn’t, they must continually be “on.”  And that means that, shooting with a cool file-based camera like the Red, or in formats like P2 or XDCamEX — which record right to cards or hard drives (enabling very very long takes), they can’t get a rest. It’s the difference between a 14-day marathon and a sprint. Wha? You’ve never heard of a 14 day marathon?  Well, that’s not atypical for a low budget film.

The other aspect of storytelling that often gets thrown under the bus in the rush to explore the advances of technology, is that filmmaking involves collaboration with larger groups of people than just yourself. This means that, if you’re exploring five different places in an actor’s monologue for a push-in, that the d.p. doesn’t get a big sense as to what is really important in the speech. It also means that I, as an editor, don’t have a good sense of what the director thought was the key Lean Forward Moment in the scene. This is often exacerbated when the actor, feeling the camera get closer and closer to his/her face, modulates the performance in time with the camera move. That means that he/she has now had to think through five different meanings for the speech. This will often mean changing the actor’s approach to what came before and what comes after that moment.

It’s a rat’s nest, and it’s easy to miscommunicate intentions.

As an editor, I love a lot of options that are delivered with some clear intentions. That’s different than experimenting without a goal. The first option usually leads to a cohesive film, which can take advantage of improvisations and great discoveries. The latter usually leads to a fragmented, scene-by-scene approach to the film’s story, and many missed opportunities.

So, while I fundamentally disagree with Schrader’s feeling that the “well-made film is dead” I do understand what he means that the drive to create populist films has pushed us further and further into technology. That, in my mind, doesn’t make for bad films (technology certainly made SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE easier to shoot and edit) but it can lead to unfocused filmmaking and that is bad.

What that means for editors is that we need to be ever more vigilant about what our stories are and how we focus and shape them. We should never stop asking:

• Whose story is this?
• How does that person change in this scene?
• Where does that person change in this scene?
• How can help the audience to feel that change at that moment?

You’ll notice that not once during those questions did I ask what camera move or special effect was used or necessary. It was all focused on story and character?

And that’s how we’ll continue to get well-made films in this tech-hungry world.