A Quote by Wade Eastwood
The worst thing that can happen is when you have gone weeks and months into elaborate sequences and the storyline of the film changes and you find out they don't need it. Sometimes you don't shoot those sequences, or they have been shot and then get edited out of the sequence you've shot gets changed and needs to be redone. That can be hard. It's not heartbreaking, but you do tend to think, "Och, all that work and effort." But that's filming, you know? You put all of these modular things into the pot, and sometimes they don't all get used.
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Well, outside of the tone, the big thing that I gained from working on horror film was how to shoot really quickly with no money. I learned how to be able to go into a production and know exactly what shot I need to get and how the shot needs to look and what performance I need to get out of the talent at a very quick pace.
You go through slumps. The shot feels good in practice and looks good and for whatever reason in the game, they're in and out. Sometimes it gets frustrating, but for me, I've played in the league long enough to know you just have to put in the work in practice and shoot with confidence, shoot your way out of it.
It might sound crazy, but filming in a conflict zone, in Afghanistan, and being a female filmmaker was the easy part. I found people open and understanding of the importance and beauty of filmic storytelling. I never had to explain why Jake Bryant, my Director of Photography, and I were climbing up a ladder to get a high shot, or running ahead to get an arrival shot, or filming weeks after weeks, months after months, collecting so much material. The process was respected and honored.
I won the Oscar for 'Raging Bull' for those fight sequences. If you look at those fight sequences, those were so incredibly storyboarded and shot in an incredible way - that is the conception a good director has to bring.
You'll still work with some directors where that doesn't happen, and sometimes it's out of necessity because you're in a really complicated, choreographed fight scene and the whole thing is being prevised in a computer, so it's been decided months before, but I think that's sneaking into the way action scenes are shot.
I never felt in competition with anybody in war photography. You're lucky to get your ass in and out again. It's as simple as that. It's the easiest photography in the world to shoot somebody who's been shot up. It doesn't take a genius. That's easy. The only thing you need to know is your photography. Get in and if you're lucky get out. And get as close as you can get.
There are certain things in the scripts that need to be planned: you know, big stunt sequences, battle sequences... you can't improvise that stuff. You can improvise when there's just two of you standing in a kitchen and the most dramatic thing that's going to happen is someone's going to open the fridge.
I was feeling pretty good out there in the middle when I went in, but it was one of those things - sometimes you get a really good ball. If it gets you out you just have to forget about it and make sure you do the hard work out there next time you get in.
Every shot feels like the first shot of the day. If I'm on the range hitting shot after shot, I can hit them just as good as I did when I was 30. But out on the course, your body changes between shots. You get out of the cart, and you've got this 170-yard 5-iron over a bunker, and it goes about 138.
Scripts are what matter. If you get the foundations right and then you get the right ingredients on top, you stand a shot... but if you get those foundations wrong, then you absolutely don't stand a shot. It's very rare-almost never-that a good film gets made from a bad screenplay.
I approach an action sequence almost like a mathematical problem. Sometimes you get these action sequences that you read and go, 'Oh my God, this is huge, how do I do it?' and I go, 'Just a step at a time. Sit down and plot each piece of it out.'
There are some sequences in films that I think work filmicly, that stand out to me, but that's much more to do with the staging and the cutting and the mood of the thing as a sequence, the way everything comes together.
There are some sequences in films that I think work filmicly, that stand out to me, but thats much more to do with the staging and the cutting and the mood of the thing as a sequence, the way everything comes together.
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 work sometimes from outlines, which are immediately abandoned. Sometimes, when I'm trying to find the characters, I'll sketch things out a bit. Sometimes, outlines help me aim a little bit, but I tend to find it's usually much more interesting, especially with the first draft, to spew it onto the page. I used to get very nervous that, if I write this first rough draft and I die that night, whoever finds it might think that I thought it was good. For me, it's much more important to get some general shape onto the page and later take all the time I need to refine it, fix it, and rewrite it.
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.
