A Quote by Mike Leigh

You can't make a movie about the artist without shooting outdoors. — © Mike Leigh
You can't make a movie about the artist without shooting outdoors.
When you're done shooting, the movie that you're going to release when you're done shooting is as bad as it will ever be. And then through editing, and finishing the effects and adding music, you get to make the movie better again. So I'm really hard on myself and on the movie.
When we were shooting the movie, and of course in the editing room we had to make choices, but the shots fall almost exactly where we thought they would. They're not about content; they're never meant to be about what just happened. There's that weird phenomenon where the more you like a movie the more your mind wanders and goes all over the place.
When you're shooting a movie that's not necessarily a huge budget, you have to think about what you can leave out and still make it interesting.
It may never happen, but I'd love to make a movie and not be rushed or concerned about shooting too much film. Probably a fantasy, but it would be nice. It would also be cool to fill a movie with all my favorite songs, but music is so damn expensive. We can't all be Cameron Crowe.
In England when you make a movie even the weather is against you. In Hollywood the weatherman gets a shooting schedule from all the major studios and then figures out where he can fit in a little rain without upsetting Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer too much.
I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a "hypaethral book," such as Thoreau talked about - a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. This is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread.
You do need to edit yourself as you shoot because you have fewer options in a smaller movie. In other words, when I'm shooting a big movie, and I got an 85 day shooting schedule or more, then I'm saying I have enough time to shoot option A and B and C and D for every scene.
Whenever you take a subject you're obsessed with or that haunts you, and make a movie about it, you're converting it into work units that need to be completed. You gotta turn it into a treatment, a script, a grant application, a bunch of forms to be filled out, a shooting schedule, casting sessions, auditions, shooting, editing, music compositions, the film festival circuit, interviews even. And by the time you've finished the process you're so sick and tired by something that was once very precious to you that you're done with it.
There are some filmmakers like the Coen brothers that are very precise. They make shooting boards, they do it shot by shot, and they follow every single line in their own script. They make amazing movies, and I admire them so much, but I can't do that. I have no idea how the movie will exactly be. While shooting, I just try to create an accident that I don't control very well - grabbing things from different sources and ideas, and then having a sensation somewhere that it will make sense.
Alfred Hitchcock talked about planning out his movies so meticulously that when he was actually shooting and editing, it was the most boring thing in the world. But drawing comics isn't like shooting a movie. You can shoot a movie in a few days and be done with it, but drawing a comic takes years and years... That's the biggest part of doing comics: You have to create stuff that makes you want to get out of bed every morning and get to work.
You never have any idea where your movie's going to go when you're shooting - you're in this little bubble. Everything you care about is getting the next step right: getting the script right, finding the right actors, shooting it.
When I am travelling or shooting outdoors, and if there is no gym around, I do pull-ups. If there is a bar somewhere, I manage push-ups, squats, and generally I just sweat it out in the room or my vanity van. But I make sure my workout regime is never hampered at any cost!
It's always hard when you make a movie that's fundamentally about kids for adults. How do you make people aware of who the adult cast is without making them feel that the adults are the center of it? You don't want to make it misleading, but at the same time you want to make it appealing.
Nowadays, if you're a great artist, you don't have to leave the house, which is a really big difference. You're closer to the artist. And the artist can be closer to their artistry without having to always worry about branding themselves or building something image-wise.
Shooting at Quentin Tarantino movie was like a masterclass in directing. Although I went back literally right into rehearsal, started shooting... while I was doing it I had to write my Grindhouse trailer and I added two days of shooting. My brother was producing Hostel and the Grindhouse trailer and I was like: "Gabe, just figure this out!"
I think that you can't make a movie without a script. But you also can't make movies without actors. You also can't make movies without technicians. And there has to be just one person in charge of everybody, and to me that one person is the director.
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