A Quote by Ken Burns
When a documentary filmmaker, working in the style that I do, suggests that there has been a shooting ratio of 40 hours to every one hour of finished film, that doesn't mean that the other 39 are bad.
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If you're a great documentary filmmaker, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're a great narrative filmmaker. There are fantastic documentary filmmakers that can't direct actors. You don't have to do that in a documentary, if it's a real documentary.
I don't know what the effective ratio would be, but I've always had some sort of intuition that for every hour you spend in the company of other human beings, you need "x" number of hours alone. Now, what "x" represents I don't really know; it might be two and seven-eighths or seven and two-eighths, but it is a substantial ratio.
Working on a film is different from working in an office. You spend 16-hour days together; you share stories and become really close. But, when you finish shooting, you don't see each other again.
Any filmmaker, big directors, and I'm not dropping any names - I actually have couple names I want to say, but I will not - we have a ratio. Each thing you repeat, my ratio is one to four.Actually some people are ratio one to 34. I know couple directors, big directors, they are just shooting over and over.
Every hour I spent on manual work, every hour I was humiliated in England or degraded has helped me because that's the same way other people feel in the townships here. People are still walking long distances and are working long hours.
I meditate twice a day. I meditate two hours every day. I spend at least an hour working out. So that's three hours every day of something mind/body discipline. Other than that: nothing.
I've never seen myself as a documentary filmmaker. I see myself as a filmmaker, period, and I am interested in drama as well as in documentary.
When you're casting a movie and when you're shooting a film, the eyes are the most important feature of any performer, really. Any great actor literally knows exactly how to use their eyes, and even as a filmmaker I love shooting huge close-ups because it's those eyes that mean so much to me.
Documentary has been a way for me to establish myself as a filmmaker. It's my way of proving that I have a language, that I can say something through film.
If you're doing an hour-long show, you're working movie hours, doing a 12-15-hour day. We work three or four hours a day, and get every third or fourth week off to give the writers time to write. It's the cushiest job in Hollywood.
The idea of Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Dracula, all I could think of was, why haven't they done this with him before? It's such a genius idea. 'Dracula' has always been done as film, so it's been an hour and 40 minutes. What we're done is 10 hours of 'Dracula,' so you have a lot of freedom with all the different mythologies and nuances.
Work like hell. I mean you just have to put in 80 to 100 hour weeks every week. [This] improves the odds of success. If other people are putting in 40 hour work weeks and you’re putting in 100 hour work weeks, then even if you’re doing the same thing you know that you will achieve in 4 months what it takes them a year to achieve.
When I started I did not know I wanted to be a filmmaker. I started - I made a film. Then when I finished I said, Oh my god it's so beautiful - I should be a filmmaker!
When you say documentary, you have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. It should be documentary style, because documentary is police photography of a scene and a murder ... that's a real document. You see, art is really useless, and a document has use. And therefore, art is never a document, but it can adopt that style. I do it. I'm called a documentary photographer. But that presupposes a quite subtle knowledge of this distinction.
I was at a Madonna show many, many years ago and I was in the sweet spot and she came out and I mean it was the best part of the show. And I was shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting. And I'm like, "God, I must have shot a hundred pictures have I not run out of film?" And I opened the back of my camera and there was no film in there. So that happened to me only once.
As a documentary filmmaker, I'm very respectful, and my interview style is not intrusive. I don't really have an agenda. I just go in there, I mumble something or other, I wait for them to speak, and I wait for them to stop.
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