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The Script Factory Masterclass
When the (Digital) Revolution Comes...Storytelling for Digital Cinema
Photo: Peter Ross
Winick, Evans, Eltringham, Beaufoy and Collins on stage in Edinburgh
Edinburgh International Film Festival, Filmhouse, Edinburgh
14 August 2002
A panel event with Gary Winick, Bille Eltringham, Simon Beaufoy and Marc Evans
Chaired by Chris Collins
These transcripts are intended for educational purposes on our site only. To reprint them in any form, you must get permission from The Script Factory.
Chris Collins (chair):
Welcome to ‘When the (Digital) Revolution Comes’. It occurred to me yesterday that this session is grossly mis-named since clearly and obviously from the evidence of the films being shown in the festival, and specifically the films of our panelists, the digital revolution is well and truly here - we are right in the midst of it. The question for us is - what kind of revolution is it? What is its effect on cinema - how we make and see films? And in particular, because this is a Script Factory session, with specific reference to how we proceed and write films.
Are we in a Paris commune? Has the Winter Palace been stormed? Is the next step to take over the empire? To answer these urgent questions we have a fantastic panel of film-makers who represent a whole range of possibilities of applying a digital approach to film-making;
Gary Winick's TADPOLEGary Winick (GW) is a founder of a company called InDigEnt which concentrates on independent digital entertainment, a production company which was founded with the specific aim of producing movies tailored to the use of digital tools to make, in their words, exploratory digital cinema. In three years the company has made a string of exciting successes including Richard Linklater’s Tape, Rebecca Miller’s Personal Velocity and now Gary’s own Tadpole which he is the director and producer of. His career has included directing five previous films as well as teaching film at NYU. Tadpole was written by Niels Mueller and Heather McGowan and was shot in fourteen days on a Sony PD150.
Bille Eltringham & Simon Beaufoy's THIS IS NOT A LOVE SONG
Bille Eltringham (BE) and Simon Beaufoy (SB) have been collaborating on films since they were at film school in the early ‘90s. Their prolific career to date has produced several short films and their 1998 feature film The Darkest Light as well as This Is Not A Love Song (which we’ll see a clip of in a minute). Individually, Bille is a director for television and Simon, as you probably will know, is one of our most successful screenwriters, most famously for The Full Monty. This Is Not A Love Song was shot in 12 days, also using Sony’s PD150 and a Canon Excel 1000...so they got to grips with a range of technologies there.
Marc Evans' frightfest My Little Eye
Marc Evans (ME), who has directed My Little Eye, which is his third feature after House of America and Resurrection Man, has been a director since 1984. His new film embraces the use of digital technology in perhaps the most technologically innovative way of the films we’re going to see today. The screenplay was written by David Hilton and James Watkins and the film was shot in 42 days...a great luxury - he could have made four films in that time (LAUGHTER), also using up to six PD150s...As you will see from the clip there is a sort of Big Brother aesthetic often using fixed camera positions ...
ME
...yes, all the camera positions in the movie were fixed, at a fixed point in a house, so we only had pans and zooms, no POVs, no tracks.
CC
I think we’ll see some clips now. I’m going to ask each person to say something about their film first. First up is This Is Not A Love Song - so do Bille and Simon want to say something about the clip that has been selected? Just give me a bit of context for the film.
BE
Ok - we’ve been calling it a love story trapped inside the body of a thriller. It’s two characters, Spike and Heaton, who are petty criminals. They’re in a stolen car that has run out of petrol. They decide to steal some petrol from a farm, or maybe they’ll buy it, but anyway they are at this farm in the middle of nowhere and they get separated. Heaton is looking in the barn for some petrol and the farmer, who’s been broken into too many times and is fed up, finds him and holds him up at gunpoint and tries to lock him in the shed - not realising there are two people. Spike meanwhile is rifling around in the farmer’s house and it’s at that point that we join the story.
CLIP from This Is Not A Love Song (APPLAUSE)
CC
Next up is My Little Eye, so Marc, do you want to say a few words about it?
ME
I suppose the problem with this film is that it was trying to do two things. One was trying to be a kind of observational website, a bit like the Big Brother site, and also it was trying it to be a horror film. We stuck to the rule that all the shots were from the point of view of these stationary cameras on the wall, these fixed camera with zooms and pans, and hidden cameras. The clip that you’ll see is taken from close to the beginning of the film. We chose it because it uses night vision, which was just literally the use of the night vision button on the PD150 camera, and there’s a sense, when you look at it, of the camera, because it’s an observational site, having to follow the action rather than anticipate it. It’s just a story that one of the characters tells the others at the beginning of the film - a part where, I think, the observational nature of the film turns into more of a genre piece.
CC
One thing I’d say very definitely - it is a horror movie.
CLIP from My Little Eye (APPLAUSE)
CC
And finally, we have the trailer for Tadpole.
GW
Yes. I don’t think I have to say much about setting up the film because I guess that’s what a trailer is supposed to do, but I do have to say after watching Bille and Marc’s clips that, when I started InDigEnt (and we’ve done nine films there) that part of the whole thing was to get film-makers to push the medium and these are, from what I’ve seen, wonderful examples of that. Unfortunately, Tadpole doesn’t really push the medium in DV; obviously it becomes more about the writing and the performance part of it - it’s told more traditionally. So out of the nine films we’ve done at InDigEnt, really mine and Campbell Scott’s Final, are probably the two that are more traditional as opposed to taking DV tools and pushing storytelling. Anyway, that’s all I’ll say.
CLIP from Tadpole (APPLAUSE)
CC
It’s now seven years since Lars von Trier and his comrades in arms conceived the Dogme manifesto, and it’s been four years since Dogme Number One, Festen, blew everybody away with its special force - I noticed a poster outside for Dogme Twenty , which demonstrates how productive that school of film-making has been to date. Now Dogme is clearly not the only force that has brought film-makers to digital film-making, but it’s a handy set of rules for film-making. For those of you who are not familiar with them it’s a set of ten commandments of what you are not allowed to do - like no additional lighting for instance or no sound post-production, things like that. But it demonstrates most clearly the irony of digital film-making, that what at first appears to be a set of severe limitations on creativity is actually a tremendously liberating force that has re-energised film-making in much the same way that lightweight cameras energised the French New Wave - once again the camera has been set free to look at the world anew and enable stories to be told in new and exciting ways. Of course, along the way many other film-makers have discovered the empowering possibilities of the digital handicam - most notably Mike Figgis has probably investigated the formal possibilities of digital cameras most effectively in films such as Time Code - as well as others, like Bernard Rose whose IVANSXTC, which is on release right now, was one of the first films to be shot, (I think) on high definition. It seems to me that what characterises many of these films is actually a kind of conscious approach to production issues, whether it’s minimal lighting or the use of improvisation or contained locations or no make-up or very small crews or whatever it is, all the films in some way enjoy the benefits of stripping back the cumbersome, unwieldy machinery of conventional film-making and the expectations and pressures that are an intrinsic part of that machine. Consequently and intentionally, this also means that the projects are often very low budget - sometimes unbelievably low - and so are also often liberated from the tortuous process, and rigorous limitations of, putting together the financing of films. So there are great opportunities for a certain kind of creative freedom and liberation which is enjoyed by film-makers - you can see evidence of that in the films. But what does this mean for the stories that are being told? Are the films genuinely providing something new or is what we’re seeing just the same old stories being told on the cheap. I’d like to bring the film-makers in on this - I’d like to start with Gary.
Gary, you set up InDigEnt, you bought into Dogme, and were perhaps influenced by Dogme and the spirit of John Cassavetes?
GW
Yes, and out of those rules that they had for Dogme, for me the most interesting thing that they got to was the idea of truth of character and setting which I feel that film-makers are always trying to get to and those rules sort of got to that. But I felt that, as a story teller, there are some unbelievable things that we can do with lighting, and with sound, and with music and Dogme cut us off that way. I felt that was something I didn’t want to pursue; I wanted to go in the opposite direction where I wanted to use the limitations - budgetary and of small cameras - for the limitations that would bring you, but yet make deals with Sound One, which is a place in New York where they do the sound mixes for all the film, and also use all these high-end visual places, just to make sure...not to limit us with music and all of that but to be able to incorporate that into the low budget, DV world that I was trying to do. So hopefully you’re not making films on the cheap for the sake of making them.
I do feel, and I have to say, I get called all the time; the idea was to make ten films in a year. Well I’ve found out you can do four...four to five - for $100,000 each. I’ve decided you can’t make them for $100,000; we shoot them for $150,000 shooting budget and $150,000 post-budget - we’d all agree that the post is where you really get into it, in terms of budget and time spent. I get calls all the time, film-makers wanting to work ...make a DV film, and my first question is ‘Well, does the story suit DV? Why are you choosing DV?’ And for the most part it’s ‘...Well I’ve been trying to get this movie made for years and I can’t raise the money so I have to do it for cheap and on DV I can afford that’.
Well, if that’s the only way then make your film on DV, because obviously you have to tell that story, and to tell that story, even if it’s not the best medium - and Tadpole’s a perfect example of that - it’s still a worthwhile story to tell hopefully and that’s going to translate and we’re going to get past the look of it. I was actually at the Sundance producer’s conference last week, on a panel, and they were talking about In the Bedroom, and how they couldn’t get that film made and could they have made it on DV? Well that film feels like it only could have been made on film, but I’m sure, if you’d made it on DV, it still would have worked - the performances and the writing were that strong.
So there is that, and then there’s the other thing, where people call me and the film feels that the right medium for it is DV.
CC
So how do you tell what story is right for DV? Is it driven by the limitations of the production process? Does it have to be a small story?
GW
Well, I look at it in two ways and actually it will segue into the whole script thing ...
BE
...the Script Factory!
GW
If it’s about the writing, which means that it becomes about the performances, I really believe you can shoot it on toilet paper - do you know what I mean? - and Celebration {Festen} proved that; the crudest set-up for the camera - the performances and the emotions were so strong it transcended it. I kind of believe that a Woody Allen film - those could be made on DV. He does a wonderful job in 35mm, with all the design elements and with the cinematographer, to make it really warrant being on 35mm; but I feel if it comes down to the writing then it’s just about telling that story, getting it across on whatever medium you can.
The other thing that really seems suitable for DV is a stylistic thing; to be able to play with the shutter speed, to have a looseness of style - hand-held...non-linear stories. Or like Marc’s film...something formal...which seems totally appropriate, because if you are talking about a voyeuristic thing what better thing than video, you know? Whether it’s because we make our home movies that way or because there are surveillance cameras all over the world now. So it becomes a stylistic thing ... There was a script that I got, years ago, that they said ‘We want to make it with InDigEnt’ and if you had $100 million you’d shoot this film. I mean Steven Soderbergh was shooting Traffic the way you’d do it DV style.
CC
I agree, it’s not really about being a recording medium, it’s more about a philosophy of film-making, an approach which involves all the aspects of film-making...
GW
Exactly. The last thing is...there are totally different ways to make films and DV has opened the doors which of course means now anyone can - but that doesn’t mean anyone should. The point is, I get calls...like Phil Hoffman {Philip Seymour Hoffman} or Alan Arkin calls me ‘...I have this great DV film and I just want to sort of ‘improv’ it and do this kind of thing...’. And yes, I would love to watch Phil Hoffman reading the phone book...so you can use DV for that or for documentary stuff, but for me, with narrative, my thinking in relation to it is that you have to be more disciplined; you have to hone your script more, storyboard more so that when you get to the set and you want to try things and you want to wing it...well it’s not going to come off.
CC
Well, maybe we’ll come back to how you work with writers in a little bit.
Bille and Simon, what interested you, what brought you to digital film-making? You’ve made several films - your first feature was quite conventional, it had all the aspects of the 35mm machine around it and yet you very consciously did this next film in a very special way. Perhaps you can tell us about how it was conceived and written, about the momentum of it.
SB
It was more to do with the form fitting the content really. We had an idea which was absolutely perfect for shooting with that rough, messy feel.
CC
So the idea came first?
SB
The idea came first. We had the idea for a while but never found ... technology kind of caught up with the idea and DV seemed perfect for this, but of course to get the kind of creative control you need you have to drop your budgets very low and the way to drop your budgets very low is to have a tiny cast and very few shooting days. So it was kind of designed round the budget and designed round the fact that we had DV and the locations were found in such a way that we could shoot three locations a day without ever having to get everyone in trucks and move them because we simply didn’t have time for that kind of thing. We went about it in a completely different way. In a way it all came out of being very, very bored with waiting three years to get a film made. We’re all film-makers and we don’t particularly want to sit and drink cappuccinos for six months of the year, although it’s quite nice - we actually want to make films and to do that we’ll do almost anything. I did the catering on This Is Not A Love Song ... the point is to work not to sit around talking about it. DV seemed to be the perfect opportunity of changing the whole very regimented, old-fashioned way. So in terms of creating it: we cast it, we had a four page outline, so we had the architecture of the film and kind of knew the curve of the story. I didn’t exactly know what would happen in the middle but I knew where the beginning was and pretty much where the end was and that we had two characters and I knew, sort of, what their characters were. Bille, from there, she cast it off the four page treatment and then we work-shopped it for two weeks with those two actors and then I went away and wrote the script.
BE
But also... I think it’s such an odd thing to do. We found a set of locations where - I was looking for locations within a tiny radius - it was going to be logistically possible to shoot it in twelve days. So I’m thinking ‘...There’s this great gorge in a field and over there is a mountain, I can do a mountain scene, there’s a really big gorge and that will be good for something’. So I’m finding locations that I think might be dramatic...
CC
That was while Simon was writing the script?
BE
That was from the four page treatment. I was going ‘Oh, this is the stuff of a chase film’. I found a bridge - I said ‘Write me a scene on a bridge’.
SB
It wasn’t this pure ‘I’ve got this film in my head that I really want to make’, it was ‘We’ve got a tiny amount of money, we’ve got a tiny amount of time...whatever happens we’ll make it work’. I wrote a big thing on a railway track which I completely loved in the film and yet we couldn’t - it would take an hour to get people into cars to move them to the railway line and we just went ‘Huh! It’s got to be the road’. You just have to move really fast and that kind of flexibility is really exciting, when you shoot at that speed and with DV and a crew of good people it’s absolutely possible to do that.
CC
If you’ve got the will. It does require a certain will to want to rewrite those scenes, doesn’t it?
Sometimes at great speed.
BE
I also would say that I completely agree with Gary that you have to be very disciplined in the way that you do that to make it possible to shoot in twelve days.
GW
But its great, your approach, the way you came to it, was very different - from the outside in instead of the inside out.
SB
Yes. We had our tools and our budget and we said ‘What can we do?’, and a vague outline of a story.
CC
And how did you get your budget? Just tell me about how you got it financed, because it was also quite a quick process wasn’t it?
BE
Originally Simon ... You went to the accountant and ... you just came up with some figure didn’t you?
SB
Yes, inadvertently. Tourette’s syndrome - I just blurted out ‘We’re going to make a film for this!’ Which was really unfortunate because it ended up costing a lot more than that and I ended putting some money of my own into it, as well as not taking a salary ...
BE
The FILM COUNCIL came in and we had a very odd conversation with Paul [Trijbits], in that we were going ‘...Well, we don’t want your money because if you pay for it then you’re going to want to tell us who the cast is...’ and he said ‘...No, I won’t...’ and so we had a really odd stand-off. In the end we came to the arrangement that he would fund it and give us enough autonomy, because the budget was low. It was really brave on his part because we said ‘We’re going to write it in 12 days but you have to make a decision in 48 hours.’ And to his enormous credit he did, we handed him the script and 48 hours later he said ‘OK, it’s green lit.’
CC
It’s precisely the kind of thing there ought to be a rule ... (LAUGHTER)
SB
It is really interesting to ask ... why does it take three years to get a film made? And actually two and a half years is a script gathering dust on people’s desks or sometimes propping up their desk while they go on holiday or have incredibly long, lengthy meetings about how they can put large budgets together and very little of it is about getting a film made. It’s a lot of logistics management and for film-makers it’s really, really boring.
CC
It sounds to me like you managed to retain an enormous amount of creative freedom by keeping your budget low, and self-financing to a degree. But it gave you a great amount of freedom to do precisely what you wanted. Do you feel now that you did what you wanted to do?
BE
Yes. It was an absolutely enormous privilege and I think that’s what’s attractive to film-makers and that’s what’s attractive about DV, and holding your budget low, is to preserve the single voice and I think that those are the things that are often lost in that huge, long build-up of development and trying to raise the money ...it becomes this huge snowball. I think just stripping it down and just going ‘What do we want to make a film about? It’s about these two guys, it’s about loyalty and love...I only want to do that - the rest of it is bollocks.’ So yes, just kind of stay focused.
CC
Marc, your film - yours was quite quick to turn around, the whole writing process...
ME
Yes it was. Everything everybody said I agree with! I don’t think my film was as heroic an endeavour as Bille’s production in a way. We had a different problem which was also relevant to DV and also took in the whole production thing and the technology of it and how you tell a story - but we were trying to do something slightly different and that was to try and tell a conventional genre story with this equipment, which is traditionally an expensive, factory-made film. I suppose, if you think about it, we were inevitably being chased by the ghost of Blair Witch, because that was the last digital horror. The reason that it is interesting to compare the process we went through with Blair Witch is that Blair Witch was a great movie and Blair Witch 2 was a shit movie, and the reason was exactly what we said - that somebody had the freedom to pursue an idea, and it’s a medium - because you need a certain amount of funding, because it’s technologically interesting, you just find yourself ... I felt, all through making the film, that even if I fall flat on my face and it fails - and you do face that a little bit more as well because you’re breaking the rules that you’re not sure you’re in command of in the first place - that at least you feel like you’re slightly heroic, a footnote in the history of this period when everybody is trying to do different things with DV. It gives you the romance of the nouvelle vague ... You feel part of something and you feel certainly part of something with a genre film because you’re referring to all other genre films. So then you go ‘...OK, I’m not doing something quite as out there as you’re [to Simon and Billie] doing ... it’s not as experimental and on the hoof really, in a certain way, but now I’m taking the rules of that and changing them and giving a DV spin on them and as a result there’s 10 percent, 20 percent of the process within which you’re adrift - you don’t quite know how you’re doing it.
What I really enjoyed about making my film was that I certainly felt that the medium was really appropriate to the genre I was trying to make, almost in a Dogme-ish way in my own head, sticking to set rules ... And also the tools that I had made me do things that would have been physically and technologically impossible even 2 or 3 years ago. It is a Script Factory session, and we do have to talk about the script, but it was almost like, in a way, what was a great deal more difficult was ‘...Yes, the script has to be tight - we had a script. Yes, you have to story board ... but in a way the medium is so intrinsic to the story-telling that actually it is our script ... You almost got to a point where you felt that you couldn’t extract then two things from each other.
CC
I would say that is certainly true...
ME
...it seemed in a way, exactly as everybody is saying really ... It’s like punk rock taking over from prog rock in the ‘70s, somebody says ‘...Hey, let’s make a punk record!...’. And actually the technology is cheaper, there are certain things you have to know about the process ...accentuated possibly more towards post-production because you have to log everything ... Those are things that anybody can find out and it is demystified and people are ... maybe I’m being a bit romantic ... helping each other out with information sharing so you can learn about cameras and you can learn about editing systems ... I think it’s a very good medium for expanding and experimenting with the storytelling process.
CC
Where did you come into the development process? Did you get the script when it was written? Was it driven by the idea of the technology?
ME
The idea ... was very specific to the story in as much as the original writer, David Hilton, had read about Big Brother happening in Holland before it happened here. So we were in this bizarre position, now that it’s known to us all, of imagining the Big Brother scenario before it actually happened. And he had one of those middle of the night writer ideas which was like ‘... What if it was a reality website and that became the basis for your horror film...’so he had this idea which he was chopping to bits in development to take further. We got together with our agents and said ... ‘Right, let’s pretend we’re going through each stage of the development process regardless of the fact that no-one is paying us to do it or not.’ So we developed the treatment and talked about it, and we developed the script and talked about it and then, at that point, and while that was by no means perfect - it’s never happened to me like that before and might never happen again - there were only three places we could go with it; Pathe, Working Title and Film Four, and some of them theoretically green lit it on the basis of the concept and an imperfect script. Then, instead of going into this frenzy of bidding wars we thought ‘...Let’s just go with the person who’ll fund us first and give us the freedom to make the film... Working Title said ‘If you make it for this you can make your film - off you go.’ It was weird, we got green lit on the last day of the Big Brother series ... By the time the second Big Brother series happened were editing.
CC
Would you say it came first, because obviously we are now familiar with the Big Brother aesthetic?
ME
It was the idea that came first. Every film has got a different reason for making it ... It just felt completely like a digital film from its inception...
GW
I think the important thing that Marc is saying, which is the really scary thing, but which makes us artists and film-makers is to take the chance because you can fall on your face. Who is going to think that a genre film can be like that but because of DV and the economics it certainly helps - you’re under the radar. Like Simon says it’s going to take three years to make the goddamn movie anyway - just do it and if it works and is successful, great, hopefully you’ll be up and running again. If not, well then, it didn’t work, it was a great experiment, it had its thing and now let’s move on and do something else.
SB
I think it’s a very interesting time with Tadpole because that is actually breaking into the mainstream. The idea is if that breaks into the mainstream it will form a kind of spearhead for DV films which as yet haven’t really broken into the box office. It will be really important defining moment for DV if it does.
GW
This is quite miserable because the Miramax thing, that was certainly a great thing for DV, for Miramax to step us and pay out in...this seven hour bidding war that was like something out of Scarface.
CC
That’s what Sundance is for isn’t it?
GW
Yes, I’d never had that experience - I’d never gotten into Sundance before. So...when that happened, I realised...it opened up all these doors - you can make a film for basically no money and get, actually, all the distributors wanting it, and paying a lot of money because they see the commercial potential. The unfortunate thing that’s happening in the States, to some degree...there have been complaints about the look of DV and of course, as I said earlier, I think if the story is engaging enough you can get past that. The problem is that unfortunately with my film, it could have looked better, there were some problems...technical stuff that we couldn’t get through - and that same camera went right to Rebecca Miller’s crew...and won the cinematography award for DV. Making a DV film,and I know this isn’t a script thing, the hardest job on a DV film is the cinematographer’s job - for the actors and the director, we’re having a great time, we’re able to do this thing, but for the cinematography, especially with these PD150s, it has nothing to do with the lighting or anything, it has to do with these cameras...they want to do everything automatically. So the discipline of checking the exposure, the gain, the focus and all of that - that’s the stuff that’s going to really come back and haunt you when you blow it up to 35mm. The unfortunate part is...I just saw a print of Rebecca Miller’s film which is going to come out in November in the States; it’s beautiful, she took it to a whole other level...it really is unfortunate for people to say ‘Oh, it’s great this film is out there on 200 screens but DV looks terrible and this is why we’re going to lose some of our audience...’, that’s the thing I’m wrestling with. What would really be the test is if it was shot with a cinematographer who was really up for those challenges and could make the DV look as pretty as it can look. I’m not saying it will look like film but for DV - have the look that it’s suited for and then see.
CC
I have this debate all the time with people, about the look of DV - it seems to me that the widening response to films like yours is not despite the look, in fact the look is a very strong part of it, but it is because you’ve got the immediacy and intimacy of the way you’ve shot and directed it and got the performances...What people are responding to really are these very distinctive voices, creative voices, which are coming out of these films. They’re refreshing and exciting because they’re not weighed down by the familiar fatigues of conventional 35mm film-making - in a way there’s a sort of danger there. I know that technology will obviously improve, the films will look better but at the end of the day do we really want to end up in the same place?
GW
... An artist uses watercolours or acrylics or oils and it’s the same thing here. Steven Soderbergh goes out of his way in Traffic...to shoot it on reversal, to degrade it to that point. I just love the idea of that, when cinematographers with some experience approach DV and say ‘OK. I know it’s not going to look like film...’ It’s like, let’s try to make DV fit the aesthetic. Hello! There’s DV that can look like this, ...like that - let’s push it to that direction.
AUDIENCE
I want to ask a question to everyone about performance - something you talked about earlier on. I remember one of the actors in Festen saying that...what was liberating for him was the performance; not hitting the mark etc, all of this. I just wondered how you all worked with that? Was there more improvisation? Did that affect the script?
BE
There isn’t any reason why digital couldn’t be shot in a completely commercial way, hit marks and be lit and do all those things. Our particular film, as you can see from that clip, is not that kind of thing. It wasn’t improvised at all; we did a workshop but actually there was a completely conventional script and in that sequence, I think there are only nine words different from the script in that whole section, so it might feel improvised but it is actually very written. What I think is interesting from an actor’s point of view, for them, is that because we weren’t using lights and because of the way the camera could move, it means that there weren’t breaks in between set-ups and so that whole big sequence, we ran through in one section. We did it six times with a couple of cameras. For an actor...a couple of hours and they’ve done the whole thing, it used to be, on 35mm...very, very, broken and I think for actors that’s why it’s very appealing as a medium.
ME
...I had a young American cast who were very technically aware, they knew what cameras did...the first scene we did as a group with four cameras there was a question about which camera would do their close-ups - well of course they wouldn’t know. So there was this combined fear of the cameras. Then, inevitably, an element of improvisation sneaked in...
GW
At InDigEnt films we use a lot of actors who have been in a lot of films, like Ethan Hawke, who directed Chelsea Walls for us and has been in Tape with Uma Thurman - it’s wonderful to hear them talk about the processes, the differences... The performance aspect is the main thing of why I like to work in DV. With Sigourney [Weaver] - besides her liking the script - she wanted to do it because it was a kind of hybrid between theatre and film. Well it is; we have these multiple cameras so they’re not playing to the camera, they’re playing with the space, they’re not worrying about focus marks, they’re just acting.
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