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Here's another excellent short film, this time from the Netherlands.

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. 

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First posted: 31 January 2012

Free Screenplays - 2015

Here we go again: the annual rush of free screenplays available on line (for an unpredictable length of time.) Grab your copies today.

99 Homes
Beasts of No Nation
Bridge of Spies
Brooklyn
Carol
Concussion
Danny Collins
Ex Machina
Far From the Madding Crowd
Grandma
I Smile Back
I’ll See You In My Dreams
Infinitely Polar Bear
Inside Out
Learning to Drive
Legend
Macbeth
Man Up
Me & Earl & the Dying Girl
Minions
Mississippi Grind
Mistress America
Pawn Sacrifice
Remember
Room
Slow West
Spotlight
Steve Jobs
Straight Outta Compton
Suffragette
Testament of Youth
The Big Short
The Danish Girl
The Diary of a Teenage Girl
The End of the Tour
The Hateful Eight
The Keeping Room
The Lady in the Van
The Son of Saul
Trainwreck
Trumbo
Truth
While We’re Young
Woman in Gold
Youth

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2011    2012    2013    2014

Audiences and happiness

The originator of the hottest theory in Hollywood today is Lindsay Doran.

Who's that? you ask.

Production executive on This Is Spinal Tap and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Executive producer of The Firm, Sense and Sensibility, Sabrina, Nanny McPhee, and Stranger Than Fiction. President of United Artists Pictures. And, these days, an independent producer.

She comes from a Hollywood family. Her father was a studio executive for nearly 50 years, who worked on films like Sunset Blvd. Her mother typed scripts for Preston Sturgess. Her brother was the publicist on 2001: A Space Odyssey. She says she "grew up listening to people talk about story. There was always the sense that the story was the thing that mattered, and that was always the thing I loved most."

After reading the book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing, by Martin E. P. Seligman, she began watching films with one eye on what Dr. Seligman calls “the five essential elements of well-being”: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. 

She analyzed critically-acclaimed movies on the American Film Institute’s favorites lists and discovered that these five factors were embedded in films as far-flung as Ferris Bueller's Day Off (characters who displayed positive emotions throughout), The Godfather (characters fully engaged in what they’re doing throughout) and The Karate Kid (a character completely focused on accomplishment).

Accomplishment
She says, “It’s no surprise that American movies specialize in stories of accomplishment. When Jennifer Grey finally dares to make the scary leap at the end of Dirty Dancing, when the Karate Kid performs the impossible kick that wipes out his opponent, or when King George VI gets through his wartime speech without stammering — those accomplishments are among the great pleasures of cinema.”

But when Lindsay Doran consulted a veteran market researcher about the five elements of well-being, he told her that audiences don’t care about an accomplishment unless it’s shared with someone else. What makes an audience happy is not the moment of victory, but the moment afterwards, when the winner shares that victory with someone they love.

Rewind the concluding scenes of these “accomplishment” films: Jennifer Grey leaps into the arms of Patrick Swayze at the end of Dirty Dancing, and after that she reconciles with her father. Jaden Smith performs that impossible kick at the end of The Karate Kid, but afterward makes peace with his opponent and shares the moment with his mother and trainer. Colin Firth conquers his stammer at the end of The King’s Speech, and then shares his victory with his wife, daughters and the crowds cheering outside the palace. The film closes with a title card that reads that the king and his speech therapist remained friends for the rest of their lives.

Some of the most elevating movies are about people desperate to achieve something that they do not get to achieve. (George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life doesn’t get to travel the world, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird doesn’t win an acquittal for his client.) Many of the greatest romances (Roman Holiday, Casablanca) are about lovers who can’t or don’t remain together. And in many movies, accomplishment is accompanied by incalculable loss. Obi-Wan dies, Dumbledore dies, Gandalf dies, 1,500 passengers on the Titanic die, thousands of Pandorans die. The protagonist may be happy at the end, but that happiness is mingled with a sense of loss.

What this suggested to Lindsay Doran is that “the accomplishment the audience values most is not when the heroine saves the day or the hero defeats his opponent. The accomplishment the audience values most is resilience.”

The thing that makes a film memorable, and might make people go back to see it a second time, might not be winning. It might be not winning, but finding something deeper, something that means more than victory. An ending in which a character survives loss might be the more inspiring, the more commercial, way to end a movie.

Gender differences

Lindsay Doran says that relationship movies are gender-specific. In movies aimed at men and boys, there is the goal, the thing the hero is trying to accomplish. Then there’s the relationship, usually with a woman, child, friend or father. Usually at the end the hero realizes the relationship is more important than the accomplishment. In most movies geared toward women, the relationship is the accomplishment. 

“Some would say that this is patronizing to women,” Ms. Doran said, but she saw it differently: “Maybe it just means that women have figured it out.”

Her conclusion: “Positive movies do not necessarily have happy endings; their characters’ personal relationships trump personal achievements; and male and female viewers differ in how they define a character’s accomplishments.”

________________

See: Perfectly Happy, Even Without Happy Endings, by Carrie Rickey, New York Times. 
        Interview with Lindsay Doran, by Melissa Silverstein,  Huffington Post.

First posted:  17 January 2012
 

'Dandelion' and 'Daisy Chain'

Here are a couple of short films created to encourage children and parents to discuss the issue of bullying. Dandelion is an original story written and directed by Galvin Scott Davis and produced by Digital Agency Protein One. It does not offer a solution, as bullying comes in many forms, yet Benjamin's story communicates the importance of keeping your confidence when those around you aim to destroy it.

The second film in the series, also written and directed by Galvin Scott Davis, is narrated by Kate Winslet. This beautiful anti-bullying tale follows Buttercup Bree and her tale of magical Daisy Chains.

The Guardian    Website

The Challenger

Good to see that Tran Quoc Bao has been busy. He's been in Vietnam editing a comedy called Jackpot, which is now the official submission from Vietnam to the 2016 Oscars. The film has its US premiere at the Asian World Film Festival in L.A. Here's the trailer:

Meanwhile, Bao has also been working on a full-length feature for which he directed the following prequel, an eight minute film called The Challenger. It stars Andy Le and Ken Quitugua.

A young Kung Fu fighter, eager to make a name for himself, challenges his hero in an underground match.

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