Let the bodies tell the story. Actions are structure Re:think how much dialogue you need. Besides, this is the age of the social smart crowd & the Cloud. You make an action film, people will drill their own won way to the fine tune.
Category Archives: MY BAD
Re:take # 3 Sentimental monologue
Re:take # 11 [making of Czar Of Make Believe]
SENTIMENTALS. No thanks.
I shoot a sequence with Kirill Mikhanovsky. He plays the russian immigrant in Wisconsin. It was fall in Milwaukee, leaves were falling.
A poetic beat, a la Ermanno Olmi? [re:take #4 Truth and Beauty]
The 16mm color 100 Kodak stock under the cloudy red skies was perfect.He looks like a Montmartre avantgardist, with a Fellini scarf. The temperature was close to freezing. Two weeks later I got my film back.
Oh, man.
Even my friend Aaron said this was film poster caliber. I thought it was a compliment. I saw emotional info established. Useful, important. I love it, therefore I keep it.
You’re justifing a slow, internal, psycho-scene from a sentimental Point of View?
Yup. For over a year I believed this nonsense. Only after my wife conceived and gave birth to our second baby, did I see what was happening. The scene was an attention sucker. Not with the rest of the film.
Bad, bad. bad.
I ended up cutting it out after the third grad-school test screening.[Re: Screen Tests]
I kept the final segment, when he climbs the tree by the riverside.
And he throws the script page by page. That was poetic allright
MY BADS
I made tons of mistakes while making my film “Czar Of Make Believe”. I made so many that the process was like being in one’s own film school. I was platooning the Arri 16 camera with Chris Smith, who was shooting “American Movie” at the same time. We were both graduate film students at UWM back then. Anyway, I took notes of my mistakes and gave each a name, so it could be a HO-TO manual for myself. Here it goes:
Mistake #1: SHOW & TELL
when you know what concept, idea or philosophy you want the film or a scene to deliver… Hold Relax, don’t do it! THat’s the mistake: putting on screen your intention. That’s bad. I used dialogue that pointed to “what is”. My bad. If my images can’t hold and hide no secrets, cut them.
