I didn't go to film school...

Let's get the shameful confession out of the way first. I didn't go to film school. 
So what? you ask. The issue came up recently in a reported comment, supposedly made by Terry Gilliam: "Film school is for fools." He did say:

Live and learn how to make films. I didn’t go to film school. I just watched movies in the cinemas. And probably my greater education was actually making films, so that’s all I would ever say: watch movies, get a camera, make a movie. And if you do it enough times, eventually you start learning how films are made. 

George Lucas went to film school, and he's done okay. Mind you, James Cameron didn't, and his movies out-gross, well, everybody's. Martin Scorsese went to film school. Stanley Kubrick, Frank Capra, Bernardo Bertolucci, Quentin Tarantino, and Alfred Hitchcock did not.

David Mamet didn't go to film school, either. He wrote copy for a girlie magazine instead, learning to combine words with pictures.

I would be given "the blues," blue-and-grey first runs of what would later be glorious color spreads of the said naked women, and I would tack them on the cork-lined walls, and I would strive to have fantasies about them. For it was all a fiction, all that stuff; their names were made-up, their biographies, their likes and peeves. It was whole cloth, like the letters to the editor. Someone made it up, and that year, that was my job.

   I think my personal best was "Katya with her pants down"; and there was also "Anna is a palindrome," but I'm not sure if that was mine.

                                                — David Mamet, Make-Believe Town, 1996

The regular reader will have observed I'm fond of David Mamet, partly for the truth of this observation of his:

Working as a screenwriter, I always thought that 'Film is a collaborative business' only constituted half of the actual phrase. From a screenwriter's point-of-view, the correct rendering should be 'Film is a collaborative business: bend over.'

But that's a digression.

Not only did he not go there, but Mamet questions the value of anyone going to film school.

Of what use is this graduate film diploma, then? As evidence of the bona fides of the applicant. For someone capable of putting up with X years of the nonsense of school would be odds-on willing to submit to the sit-down-and-shut-up rigors of the bureaucratic environment.
                                — David Mamet, Bambi vs. Godzilla, 2008

Robert Rodriguez, director of Sin City, Spy Kids, El Mariachi and a bunch others, has this advice about film school.

If you want to be a filmmaker and you can’t afford film school, know that you don’t really learn anything in film school anyway. They can never teach you how to tell a story, or all you’ll do is tell stories like everyone else. You learn to tell stories by telling stories. And you want to learn your own way of doing things.        
                         — Robert Rodriguez, Rebel without a Crew,1996

Werner Herzog has been quite vocal in arguing against film school. 

You don't need to go to film school. You can learn the technical things in less than a week. All the rest you can learn by traveling on foot. You have to have fundamental experiences in life, like solitude. You have to experience it to know what it means.

I asked Brian McDonald what he thought about the line: "Film school is for fools."

That sounds kinda harsh. But there is something weird about film school. None of the old masters of film went to film school because such a thing did not exist. For example, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, George Cukor, William Wellman, William Wyler, David Lean, Victor Fleming, George Stevens, Charlie Chaplin, Leo McCarey, Elia Kazan, Orson Wells, King Vidor, and Raoul Walsh never went to film school. Those are all directors, but I could list as many screenwriters, editors, and other crafts people who did not get their film education in schools. 
   I didn’t go. Many of my friends who did go say they felt it was a waste of time in most respects. There are often some basic storytelling concepts they are either not taught or not taught well. I think basic skills of communication are sometimes seen as pedestrian in academic circles, so they favor the avant-garde.

   I’m not telling anyone not to go the film school, but to understand that your school may not be making you familiar with all the things that might help you become an effective communicator in the film medium. It will still be your job to seek those things out. Storytelling is not something you can ever fully master. To be good at it you have to have a ravenous appetite for information about your craft.

For every case against, there will always be one for. In this instance, it comes in the form of a book from Steve Boman—Film School: The True Story of a Midwestern Family Man Who Went to the World's Most Famous Film School, Fell Flat on His Face, Had a Stroke, and Sold a Television Series to CBS. 

You can read a review of that book by Jonathon Zimmerman (who himself went to film school and has things to say on the subject) in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

First posted:  3 February 2012

Ten lessons from Terry Gilliam

Back in December 2011, in Filmmaker magazine, Ariston Anderson published the following gentle wisdom about filmmaking by Terry Gilliam, member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and the legendary writer/director of Life of Brian, Brazil, The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

This list is a mixture of answers to interview questions, and comments made during a lecture.

1. Growing up is for losers.

As a child, I always drew funny creatures, funny characters. But I think the trick is not to grow up, not to learn to be an adult. And if you can maintain the kind of imagination you all had when you were babies, you would all be wonderful filmmakers. But the world tries to make you grow up, to stop imagining, stop fantasizing, stop playing in your mind. And I’ve worked hard to not let the world educate me. 

2. Film school is for fools.

Live and learn how to make films. I didn’t go to film school. I just watched movies in the cinemas. And probably my greater education was actually making films, so that’s all I would ever say: watch movies, get a camera, make a movie. And if you do it enough times, eventually you start learning how films are made. 

3. Auteurism is out. Fil-teurism is in.

Being an auteur is what we all dreamed of being, as far [back] as the films of the late ‘50s and ‘60s, when the idea of the auteur filmmaker arrived on the planet. And people kept using that term, and they do with my movies because I suppose they are very individual and they give me all the credit, so they say I’m an auteur. And I say no, the reality is I’m a ‘fil-teur.’ I know what I’m trying to make but I have a lot of people who are around me who are my friends and don’t take orders and don’t listen to me, but who have individual ideas. And when they come up with a good idea, if it’s one that fits what I’m trying to do, I use it. So the end film is a collaboration of a lot of people, and I’m the filter who decides what goes in and what stays out.

4. Put your ideas in a drawer. Take them out as needed.

I do have a drawer in my desk with all the ideas that I have and that I scribbled out. I put them in there and some day I use them. At the beginning of a new film, I often go in that drawer and look at everything I’ve done and see if there are some ideas that might apply to what I’m doing. But things grow, so I just start with a sketch and then refine it. And you do it with other people’s ideas coming in. That’s the fun part. 

5. All you’ve really got in life is story.

I think the important thing is stay true to what you believe. I mean it’s much more important to make your mistakes than somebody else’s mistakes. Like too many other filmmakers have compromised because somebody advised them [that] if you change this, the film will be more successful commercially. And then the film isn’t successful commercially, and these people get so depressed and destroyed because they didn’t ever finish making their film the way they intended it. You’ve got to believe in what you’re doing. And you’ve got to be willing to take the consequences of whatever it is. If you succeed, fantastic. If you fail, you might have to get a proper job.

6. Command the audience with your lens.
I keep wanting to see more of the world always. When I’m looking through the camera, when we’re setting up a scene, I don’t feel like I’m in the scene. And the wide angle lens, because we see so much, it seems to wrap around me a little bit. I also like the fact that with long lenses, the director controls the audience much more because you show the audience only exactly what you want. Everything else can be out of focus. And I like it to be a little bit more vague so the audience has to be aware of the environment as well as what I want them to look at. I don’t want to really separate the character from the world that it’s in. So the world is as important, and the rooms and everything, as the character sometimes. 

7. Nothing can defeat a director who is one with his actors.

I think the key is to make sure that the cast, especially if they’re big Hollywood superstars, likes the movie. My first film in Hollywood was The Fischer King, and Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges are playing the two leads. And I knew as long as Robin, Jeff and I were united, there was no way the studio could break it, and the film would go out. Same way with Twelve Monkeys. Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis and I were one. In both instances those films went very smoothly.

8. Surround yourself with improvisers.

I like the actor to surprise me all the time because the problem when you’re making a film, if you’ve written it and you’re directing it, you’ve been with it so long, it becomes a bit rigid. It can become mechanical when you’re shooting because you’re just trying to do exactly what you were thinking about for the last year. And what’s wonderful is when the actors come in and they do something that’s completely surprising, and suddenly every day becomes fresh. And it makes me stay awake. 

9. Directing is not for the faint-of-heart. Or the sane.

What I love about Don Quixote is that he keeps misinterpreting the world. He thinks the world is either worse or better or whatever. He gets it wrong every time. But in the end he has these heroic, epic moments, and he seems to be unstoppable. He just goes on and on and on. I think it’s a great example for people, especially in film, in how to get through life, because film can often be incredibly disappointing. What I like about the Don Quixote documentary is that so many other filmmakers when they saw that, they started telling me their stories of equally horrible disasters. It’s a very difficult business. [Lost in La Mancha] should discourage anyone who is not willing to live in a world where disasters like that occur. Don’t make films if you’re not going to be able to deal with things like that. I’m always working on it and one day it will happen. It’s changed me. If you’re going to make a film about Don Quixote, you’ve got to be as mad as Don Quixote, so the nature is helping me go crazy.

10. Be an enlightened despot.
I expect the actors to really be totally committed to the film and to their character and forget about who they are. Get rid of your vanity. Just be whatever the character demands. I think it’s horrible when I hear stories of actors coming and they bring their own makeup people and their hairdresser. Wait a minute, what’s going on here? The power is in the wrong hands. And if you let the power go to the actor, then you’re not directing the movie. And the actor is not thinking about the entire movie. Only the director is thinking about the entire movie. I don’t ever want to be the guy that is saying, “this is the only way that it can be done.” I don’t want to be a dictator. That’s not interesting. It’s interesting if you can have a dialogue going all the time and trying to all agree to find what is the best way for this film to go. 

---

First posted: 31 January 2012

"1884: Yesterdays Future"

1884: Yesterday's Future is the steam-powered wonder of a Terry Gilliam-imagined future London, envisioned from the perspective of a respectable burgher in 1844.

It was directed by Tim Ollive.

What's all the hoo-ha about?

I suppose it was Monty Python's Flying Circus that started it all. Animated silliness, frequently set to music. Heads being chopped off, blown up, or replaced by unlikely substitutes. Big feet coming down from above and crushing very distinguished looking people. Yes, that's you I'm talking about, Terry Gilliam.



That show was first produced in 1969, and continued to be manufactured, sometimes by lumberjacks, until 1974.


On the demise of the show, people around the world tried to manufacture substitutes. Some pleasing efforts resulted, but it was never quite enough. A quick look at Lifetime Gross box-office takings in the USA suggest that people still like animated silliness, in all its various forms.

Computer animation brought things closer to home. Cheap, or free, computer animation programs have unleashed the hitherto shackled creativity latent in numerous persons. Just to give you an idea, here is a list of free, yes free (though maybe with built-in limitations), animation software available on the internet.

So what, you ask. Well, all that was a lead-in to me saying, there's a new channel on YouTube. It's called HuHa and is self-described as follows:

Brightly-Coloured Animated Flipflappery for Adults.

The tastiest comedy toons on YouTube - featuring animal assassins, crime-fighting butchers, appalling advice and shocking greetings cards to send your frenemies.

Head chef Mr Weebl (the guy who brought you singing narwhals and that badger song. You know the one. It goes "badgers, badgers, badgers, badgers". It's about badgers) will be serving up a technicolour soup of delicious adult animation for your delectation.

Yes, appalling, isn't it. It gets worse. Here's their promotional video.


Sorry about the annoying whine at the end. That's what passes for humour these days, and, under the present government, there's nothing I can do about it.

Over the last few years, we have featured interviews with selected representatives of the Australian home computer animation cadre. These would include Levi George (Livin' With Steve), Brett Snelgrove (New Eden) and Chris George (Fried Rice).

Now we have news in from England that New Eden, by Brett Snelgrove and Freek van Haagen, has been elevated up the batting order. They were invited to contribute to HuHa and will be venturing there forthwith. Here's the evidence.


And to think it was all caused by Terry Gilliam in an unguarded moment...

I didn't go to film school...

Let's get the shameful confession out of the way first. I didn't go to film school. So what? you ask. The issue came up recently in a reported comment, supposedly made by Terry Gilliam: "Film school is for fools." He did say:

Live and learn how to make films. I didn’t go to film school. I just watched movies in the cinemas. And probably my greater education was actually making films, so that’s all I would ever say: watch movies, get a camera, make a movie. And if you do it enough times, eventually you start learning how films are made. 

George Lucas went to film school, and he's done okay. Mind you, James Cameron didn't, and his movies out-gross, well, everybody's. Martin Scorsese went to film school. Stanley Kubrick, Frank Capra, Bernardo Bertolucci, Quentin Tarantino, and Alfred Hitchcock did not.

David Mamet didn't go to film school, either. He wrote copy for a girlie magazine instead, learning to combine words with pictures.

I would be given "the blues," blue-and-grey first runs of what would later be glorious color spreads of the said naked women, and I would tack them on the cork-lined walls, and I would strive to have fantasies about them. For it was all a fiction, all that stuff; their names were made-up, their biographies, their likes and peeves. It was whole cloth, like the letters to the editor. Someone made it up, and that year, that was my job.

   I think my personal best was "Katya with her pants down"; and there was also "Anna is a palindrome," but I'm not sure if that was mine.

                                                — David Mamet, Make-Believe Town, 1996

The regular reader will have observed I'm fond of David Mamet, partly for the truth of this observation of his:

Working as a screenwriter, I always thought that 'Film is a collaborative business' only constituted half of the actual phrase. From a screenwriter's point-of-view, the correct rendering should be 'Film is a collaborative business: bend over.'

But that's a digression.

Not only did he not go there, but Mamet questions the value of anyone going to film school.

Of what use is this graduate film diploma, then? As evidence of the bona fides of the applicant. For someone capable of putting up with X years of the nonsense of school would be odds-on willing to submit to the sit-down-and-shut-up rigors of the bureaucratic environment.
                                — David Mamet, Bambi vs. Godzilla, 2008

Robert Rodriguez, director of Sin City, Spy Kids, El Mariachi and a bunch others, has this advice about film school.

If you want to be a filmmaker and you can’t afford film school, know that you don’t really learn anything in film school anyway. They can never teach you how to tell a story, or all you’ll do is tell stories like everyone else. You learn to tell stories by telling stories. And you want to learn your own way of doing things.        
                         — Robert Rodriguez, Rebel without a Crew,1996

Werner Herzog has been quite vocal in arguing against film school. 

You don't need to go to film school. You can learn the technical things in less than a week. All the rest you can learn by traveling on foot. You have to have fundamental experiences in life, like solitude. You have to experience it to know what it means.

I asked Brian McDonald what he thought about the line: "Film school is for fools."

That sounds kinda harsh. But there is something weird about film school. None of the old masters of film went to film school because such a thing did not exist. For example, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, George Cukor, William Wellman, William Wyler, David Lean, Victor Fleming, George Stevens, Charlie Chaplin, Leo McCarey, Elia Kazan, Orson Wells, King Vidor, and Raoul Walsh never went to film school. Those are all directors, but I could list as many screenwriters, editors, and other crafts people who did not get their film education in schools. 
   I didn’t go. Many of my friends who did go say they felt it was a waste of time in most respects. There are often some basic storytelling concepts they are either not taught or not taught well. I think basic skills of communication are sometimes seen as pedestrian in academic circles, so they favor the avant-garde.

   I’m not telling anyone not to go the film school, but to understand that your school may not be making you familiar with all the things that might help you become an effective communicator in the film medium. It will still be your job to seek those things out. Storytelling is not something you can ever fully master. To be good at it you have to have a ravenous appetite for information about your craft.

For every case against, there will always be one for. In this instance, it comes in the form of a book from Steve Boman—Film School: The True Story of a Midwestern Family Man Who Went to the World's Most Famous Film School, Fell Flat on His Face, Had a Stroke, and Sold a Television Series to CBS. 

You can read a review of that book by Jonathon Zimmerman (who himself went to film school and has things to say on the subject) in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Ten lessons from Terry Gilliam

Back in December 2011, in Filmmaker magazine, Ariston Anderson published the following gentle wisdom about filmmaking by Terry Gilliam, member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and the legendary writer/director of Life of Brian, Brazil, The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

This list is a mixture of answers to interview questions, and comments made during a lecture.

1. Growing up is for losers.

As a child, I always drew funny creatures, funny characters. But I think the trick is not to grow up, not to learn to be an adult. And if you can maintain the kind of imagination you all had when you were babies, you would all be wonderful filmmakers. But the world tries to make you grow up, to stop imagining, stop fantasizing, stop playing in your mind. And I’ve worked hard to not let the world educate me. 

2. Film school is for fools.

Live and learn how to make films. I didn’t go to film school. I just watched movies in the cinemas. And probably my greater education was actually making films, so that’s all I would ever say: watch movies, get a camera, make a movie. And if you do it enough times, eventually you start learning how films are made. 

3. Auteurism is out. Fil-teurism is in.

Being an auteur is what we all dreamed of being, as far [back] as the films of the late ‘50s and ‘60s, when the idea of the auteur filmmaker arrived on the planet. And people kept using that term, and they do with my movies because I suppose they are very individual and they give me all the credit, so they say I’m an auteur. And I say no, the reality is I’m a ‘fil-teur.’ I know what I’m trying to make but I have a lot of people who are around me who are my friends and don’t take orders and don’t listen to me, but who have individual ideas. And when they come up with a good idea, if it’s one that fits what I’m trying to do, I use it. So the end film is a collaboration of a lot of people, and I’m the filter who decides what goes in and what stays out.

4. Put your ideas in a drawer. Take them out as needed.

I do have a drawer in my desk with all the ideas that I have and that I scribbled out. I put them in there and some day I use them. At the beginning of a new film, I often go in that drawer and look at everything I’ve done and see if there are some ideas that might apply to what I’m doing. But things grow, so I just start with a sketch and then refine it. And you do it with other people’s ideas coming in. That’s the fun part. 

5. All you’ve really got in life is story.

I think the important thing is stay true to what you believe. I mean it’s much more important to make your mistakes than somebody else’s mistakes. Like too many other filmmakers have compromised because somebody advised them [that] if you change this, the film will be more successful commercially. And then the film isn’t successful commercially, and these people get so depressed and destroyed because they didn’t ever finish making their film the way they intended it. You’ve got to believe in what you’re doing. And you’ve got to be willing to take the consequences of whatever it is. If you succeed, fantastic. If you fail, you might have to get a proper job.

6. Command the audience with your lens.
I keep wanting to see more of the world always. When I’m looking through the camera, when we’re setting up a scene, I don’t feel like I’m in the scene. And the wide angle lens, because we see so much, it seems to wrap around me a little bit. I also like the fact that with long lenses, the director controls the audience much more because you show the audience only exactly what you want. Everything else can be out of focus. And I like it to be a little bit more vague so the audience has to be aware of the environment as well as what I want them to look at. I don’t want to really separate the character from the world that it’s in. So the world is as important, and the rooms and everything, as the character sometimes. 

7. Nothing can defeat a director who is one with his actors.

I think the key is to make sure that the cast, especially if they’re big Hollywood superstars, likes the movie. My first film in Hollywood was The Fischer King, and Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges are playing the two leads. And I knew as long as Robin, Jeff and I were united, there was no way the studio could break it, and the film would go out. Same way with Twelve Monkeys. Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis and I were one. In both instances those films went very smoothly.

8. Surround yourself with improvisers.

I like the actor to surprise me all the time because the problem when you’re making a film, if you’ve written it and you’re directing it, you’ve been with it so long, it becomes a bit rigid. It can become mechanical when you’re shooting because you’re just trying to do exactly what you were thinking about for the last year. And what’s wonderful is when the actors come in and they do something that’s completely surprising, and suddenly every day becomes fresh. And it makes me stay awake. 

9. Directing is not for the faint-of-heart. Or the sane.

What I love about Don Quixote is that he keeps misinterpreting the world. He thinks the world is either worse or better or whatever. He gets it wrong every time. But in the end he has these heroic, epic moments, and he seems to be unstoppable. He just goes on and on and on. I think it’s a great example for people, especially in film, in how to get through life, because film can often be incredibly disappointing. What I like about the Don Quixote documentary is that so many other filmmakers when they saw that, they started telling me their stories of equally horrible disasters. It’s a very difficult business. [Lost in La Mancha] should discourage anyone who is not willing to live in a world where disasters like that occur. Don’t make films if you’re not going to be able to deal with things like that. I’m always working on it and one day it will happen. It’s changed me. If you’re going to make a film about Don Quixote, you’ve got to be as mad as Don Quixote, so the nature is helping me go crazy.

10. Be an enlightened despot.
I expect the actors to really be totally committed to the film and to their character and forget about who they are. Get rid of your vanity. Just be whatever the character demands. I think it’s horrible when I hear stories of actors coming and they bring their own makeup people and their hairdresser. Wait a minute, what’s going on here? The power is in the wrong hands. And if you let the power go to the actor, then you’re not directing the movie. And the actor is not thinking about the entire movie. Only the director is thinking about the entire movie. I don’t ever want to be the guy that is saying, “this is the only way that it can be done.” I don’t want to be a dictator. That’s not interesting. It’s interesting if you can have a dialogue going all the time and trying to all agree to find what is the best way for this film to go.