201
Fourth Conversation
0
terms
3
notes
215
M: One of the side benefits of moving Zoetrope up to San Francisco in 1969 was to take the filmmaking out of a self-contained film universe. In Los Angeles it's very easy, if you get to a certain level in your profession, to live, breathe, eat, think, sleep film. And to have so many offers that you're working all the time—without that ability, given by time and space, to reinvent.
In San Francisco there's not that much work. There aren't that many producers up here. There's a kind of enforced idleness between projects that allows you to develop other interests and then, in the best sense, to plow the results of those interests back into the next film.
M: One of the side benefits of moving Zoetrope up to San Francisco in 1969 was to take the filmmaking out of a self-contained film universe. In Los Angeles it's very easy, if you get to a certain level in your profession, to live, breathe, eat, think, sleep film. And to have so many offers that you're working all the time—without that ability, given by time and space, to reinvent.
In San Francisco there's not that much work. There aren't that many producers up here. There's a kind of enforced idleness between projects that allows you to develop other interests and then, in the best sense, to plow the results of those interests back into the next film.
217
It has to be said—both systems have their risks. The risk of the Hitchcock-ian system is that you may stifle the creative force of the people who are collaborating with you. The film that results—even if it's a perfect vision of what somebody had in his head—can be lifeless: it seems to exist on its own, without the necessary collaboration either of the people who made the film or even, ultimately, the audience. It says: I am what I am whether you like it or not.
On the other hand, the risk with the process-driven film is that it can collapse into chaos. Somehow the central organizing vision can be so eaten away and compromised by all the various contributors that it collapses under its own weight.
It has to be said—both systems have their risks. The risk of the Hitchcock-ian system is that you may stifle the creative force of the people who are collaborating with you. The film that results—even if it's a perfect vision of what somebody had in his head—can be lifeless: it seems to exist on its own, without the necessary collaboration either of the people who made the film or even, ultimately, the audience. It says: I am what I am whether you like it or not.
On the other hand, the risk with the process-driven film is that it can collapse into chaos. Somehow the central organizing vision can be so eaten away and compromised by all the various contributors that it collapses under its own weight.
268
You remember you told me how much you liked the line breaks in my translations of Malaparte? The decision where to cut film is very similar to the decision, in writing poetry, of where to end each line. On which word? That end point has little if anything to do with the grammar of the sentence. It's just that the line is full and ripe at that point, full of meaning and ripe with rhythm. By ending it where he does, the poet exposes that last word to the blankness of the page, which is a way of emphasizing the word. If he adds two words after it, he immerses that word within the line, and it has less visibility, less significance. We do very much the same in film: the end of a shot gives the image of that last frame an added significance, which we exploit.
You remember you told me how much you liked the line breaks in my translations of Malaparte? The decision where to cut film is very similar to the decision, in writing poetry, of where to end each line. On which word? That end point has little if anything to do with the grammar of the sentence. It's just that the line is full and ripe at that point, full of meaning and ripe with rhythm. By ending it where he does, the poet exposes that last word to the blankness of the page, which is a way of emphasizing the word. If he adds two words after it, he immerses that word within the line, and it has less visibility, less significance. We do very much the same in film: the end of a shot gives the image of that last frame an added significance, which we exploit.