filmmaking
A dissolve is a film technique, usually a transition from scene to scene where image A begins to fade out, overlapped with the fade in of image B. And it’s a technique which even predates cinema. It comes from magic lantern days when they were doing slide to slide. Rather than having a cut, just a slam, they would do an overlap. It was more pleasing. Nowadays you don’t see too many dissolves in movies. And I never paid attention to when they went out of fashion. And Kevin Tent, my editor, and I think they’re beautiful. I happen to be a big fan of Hal Ashby films in the ’70s and to my mind, he an ex-editor, was a master of dissolves, and particularly long dissolves. For me, they lend emotion to a film and there’s a kind of a melancholy that comes from them.
“Director Alexander Payne on Mining Every Film for Comic Potential,” Fresh Air with Terry Gross, NPR, December 2, 2013.
Related, but more practical subjects, will be the art of lockpicking. Traveling on foot. The exhilaration of being shot at unsuccessfully. The athletic side of filmmaking. The creation of your own shooting permits. The neutralization of bureaucracy. Guerrilla tactics. Self reliance. Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.
Curriculum / Rules for Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School.
All those trashy special effects and miniatures that you see in Hollywood movies have caused audiences to lose trust in their eyes. Here, in my film, they are given back trust in their own eyes. When the boat goes up the mountain, people look at the screen, looking for something to tell them it’s a trick, but it’s no trick. Instinctively, they sense it. An image like that gives you courage for your own dreams.
Profile in Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 62.
I remember getting one script, and the people said, “Okay, well, it needs some help with the plot, the pace, the characters and the dialogue. And I said, “What did you like about it, the typing?”
“John Sayles Interview,” The Star-Ledger (New Jersey), August 14, 2011.
Censorship will be enforced. There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your Boundaries, and Inner Growth.
Werner Herzog describing his Rogue Film School.
Clint [Eastwood] is incredibly instinctive and he’s anti-neurosis. It’s like antimatter. He’s totally without neurosis. The set of Hereafter was one of happiest places I’ve ever been. It comes from trusting yourself and eliminating fear.
“Eastwood Breaks Another Mold,” by Charles McGrath, The New York Times, October 13, 2010.
A film is not about its subject. It’s about how it’s about its subject.
Roger Ebert’s 1997 interview with Martin Scorsese at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, quoted on NPR’s Fresh Air.
I don’t storyboard. I guess it dates back to my days in live television, where there was no possibility of storyboarding and everything was shot right on the spot—on the air, as we say—at the moment we were transmitting. I prefer to be open to what the actors do, how they interact to the given situation. So many surprising things happen on the set, and I have the feeling that storyboarding might tend to close your mind to the accidental.
“Arthur Penn, Director of ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ Dies,” by David Kehr, The New York Times, September 29, 2010.
Movies can’t correct human injustice all by themselves, but they can show it, they can touch you while showing it, and they can seed ideas and wake up dormant minds. For a medium that began — pretty much in my early childhood — as a few flickering images on a nickelodeon machine, that’s pretty powerful stuff.
“Irving Ravetch, Screenwriter, Dies at 89,” by Bruce Weber, The New York Times, September 21, 2010.
The only screenplays that aren’t tampered with are the ones that aren’t made. Making a movie is an ensemble act. Writers are not authors out there. And scripts are not books. They’re blueprints. You work with others or you’re gone.
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. I (New York: Picador, 2006), 398.