A Quote by Alexandra McGuinness
Everyone in the Lotus Eaters is so concerned with appearances, but there's an emptiness under the surface that they're trying to ignore. We talked about the theme of perception versus reality a lot with mirrors and masks what people were wearing - and we shot on two formats; we shot it on film and on digital, and a lot of the night-time scenes are film, and it looks better, and people can put on a mask and they can go out there and show an artifice to the world.
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I shot my undergraduate work on 35mm. I love the way it looks, but I haven't shot film in a while. If you can avoid scanning, it makes your practice faster. Oh, and I shoot a lot of Polaroid, too. I have about five hundred Polaroids from my film that I hope to show soon.
If I'm ever working on a set and anyone talks about a master shot, I say there is no master shot. Before I even went to film school, I learned about movies by being in a British feature film, where everything was shot master shot, mid-shot, close-up. But I reject the idea of a master shot. You don't shoot everything mechanically; you find imaginative ways that serve the action.
Even before 'Moon,' I did a short film called 'Whistle,' and it had a lot of the things that I thought I would need to be able to do on a feature film: I shot on location, there was special FX work, there was stunt work, we used squibs, I shot on 35 mm film.
I shot film with the Coen brothers on 'Hail, Caesar!' That's fine. I'm sentimental about film; I've shot film for forty years or something.
I think that a lot of the most talented and driven people, they're not super deterred by failure. So if you put out a really big challenge, I think they get reality excited by that - they say, 'Hey, why not, let's go give it a shot, and if we fall short on that, at least we took a shot at doing something really important and meaningful.'
There's nothing worse than an ostentatious shot or some lighting that draws attention to itself, and you might go, 'Oh, wow, that's spectacular.' Or that spectacular shot, a big crane move, or something. But it's not necessarily right for the film — you jump out, you think about the surface, and you don't stay in there with the characters and the story.
When I was in Hungary in December I was looking at student films and I could not tell which ones were shot on film and which ones were shot digitally. I think that is because the filmmakers in Europe go to four years of film school and learn the techniques.
I'm very interested in clans and the way people group together, and there's a lot of group shots. There's a lot of people in positions that people feel like they're in attack mode, kind of pointed at each other in the frame. I'm not a big fan of shooting something that looks like it could belong in any movie, I'm not a fan of okay, "wide shot, wide shot, medium shot, close-up, close-up, we'll figure it out in post." I hate that.
As an actor, my attitude towards using of film versus digital is, if you have film, filmmakers have to cut eventually so you don't have to learn all that dialogue. With digital, they can just go on forever and it's a nightmare. So, I like film - nice short takes.
We shot 'Party Girl' on film, and I remember being told, 'We need to get this in two takes because we don't have a lot of film in the mag right now!'
I did a film that I shot in 24 hours that was self-financed for $5,000. It was a feature called Looking For Jimmy that I shot with a bunch of friends. I spent eight months editing because we had 24 hours of footage that made no sense and I learned a lot about directing while editing that film.
What we were trying very hard to do, just in the way we shot it, was to make it feel as if we're in that environment ourselves, just so we can get a grasp on what it is. A lot of our influence was about getting stuck on a level on any of those video games, where you find yourself caught and you can't get out, and it's maddening. We talked a lot about that.
If you need to strap a camera to you or get in a small space, then it makes sense to use digital.I do think it is possible to use a digital camera artistically, but it can only be good if you are using film technique. Film has grain, and digital has pixels, and there is not that much of a difference, but digital does not replace the need to create a scene and light it properly and spend time considering the shot.
A shot of Shyam Benegal inspires me a lot. I wonder why a film of David Dhawan cannot have a shot like that.
The film business talks a lot. People talk a lot. There's a lot of chatting. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes chatting. There's a lot of talking before you go and do it.
Saturday The 14th movie is a cult classic. And you know another one like that that I did, is Three O'Clock High. People come up to me about those two all the time. Film schools even study Three O'Clock High. Shot for shot, it's a textbook.
