A Quote by Haskell Wexler

There was no actually stock footage in "Medium Cool." I wrote the script. I wrote the riots. And I integrated the actors in the film in the park during the demonstrations. But nowhere was it like we had stock footage and then later, in editing, integrated it into the film. It was all done at the time.
For this game, we shot it just like it as if it was a film so there wasn't that much different from doing a film other than some technical things for the costume that had to be done so they could transfer the footage later and make it look animated.
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.
Not only do I look at the playback with the actors, but I look at the on-set assembly footage with the sequences with my actors as well. These are the reasons why I take twice as much time to shoot a film in Korea. Thinking back, I remember on my first ever Korean film, I never used any playback or on-set assembly, so all I had to do was to tell myself it's just like making my first ever Korean-language film. After that, I felt right at home.
Over time it just got more and more intense as far as the trust factor. For example, when we started editing the film [Dream of Life], I thought, man, I need to make sense of all the footage I have; I need to ground the film. And one day I was hanging out in Patti's [Smith] bedroom, which is where Patti works, and in the corner of her bedroom is this great chair, and that's when she began showing her personal things to me. The camera was there, and we realized that we were really making the movie and making sense of the footage in the movie.
If you look at the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on 'Titanic,' you ask yourself, why on earth would they turn to stock footage? The answer is simple, many scenes used for the narrative of the film don't need to be expensively shot and can be bought from us.
We had a hodgepodge of footage. We didn't film [in Dream of Life ]all the time - we would just film periodically, so nothing was synced and nothing was slated.
I wrote a film for Tom Hanks and I wrote two films for Paul Greengrass that didn't actually happen. The paradox is that the bigger the film you write, the less likely it is to happen.
I stopped doing that [photojournalism] and wrote some screenplays on speculation, because even though I wanted to direct, to direct you need a lot of money. Even for a cheap movie, you need film stock and equipment and actors.
When I wrote my first film and then directed it and I looked at it for the first time on what's called an assembly, you look at this movie which is every scene you wrote, every line of dialogue you wrote and you want to kill yourself the minute you see it. It's like, 'How did I write something so horrible?'
It turned out it was really easy to create commercial stock footage.
One thing that the audience, and perhaps critics, aren't aware of is that, especially in a film like 'Moonlight,' you always shoot a lot more footage than makes the cut of the film.
The way the recession has affected Hollywood, a lot of actors that had robust opportunities before in film no longer have such plum options, so cable has done a good job of becoming a happy medium for artists deemed film actors.
There's this kind of incredibly mistaken idea that because it's so much cheaper to roll the camera than it used to be and it's so much easier to accumulate a ton of footage, that then you can just go shoot a ton of footage and the editor will make sense out of it. But if you don't have something deliberate made, you're not gonna save it in the editing room.
I love archival films very much. I spent thousands of hours watching archive footage. Every time I see it, I see something. Sometimes I think I know this footage, but two years later, I see it again, and I see something new.
It's funny; before I started writing professionally, I had a job logging video footage for behind-the-scenes footage for special features.
Ah, 'Pather Panchali' was the most inspiring film that I wrote music for, and it was so spontaneously done. I saw the film, composed on the spot, along with myself and only four other musicians, and everything was done within 4-1/2 hours, I think an all-time record anywhere.
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