Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/618780
24 dga quarterly PHOTOS: (LEFT TO RIGHT) COURTESY LEE DANIELS, BRIAN SMALE, NICHOLAS GUERIN/CORBIS LEE DANIELS The Next Act "My roots, my DNA, what I know is what it's like to live as an African-American and as a gay man. And I think trying to marry myself, and stories that speak to me, to the studio world has been hard. They want Precious, they want another some- thing like that, but they're afraid. "I think that African-American cinema, unless it's buffoonery, is dead in Holly- wood. And I think that even though Precious made money here and interna- tionally, they felt that it was a fluke. But that only inspires me to create, because I've always been an underdog. 'Really, Lee, you're making a movie about that?' "I can't embrace anything unless I can identify with the world." JIM JARMUSCH Street Smart Stranger Than Paradise won the Caméra d'Or at Cannes [in 1984] and was bought in territories around the world. "And I thought, maybe I could keep doing this, though we were trying to make a film for ourselves that we would like. We were not at all conscious of the world of cinema commerce—and maybe we were naive. I was very lucky, too, partly being at the right place, right time. I think if we tried to make a film like that now, they'd laugh me out of the room. 'What the hell is this? Each scene is a single setup?' But that got me started. "The definition of independent for me is having creative control over the film. You have to have a strong backbone and be willing to walk away from things. It's easy for me." LYNN SHELTON Let's Make a Movie "[On my first film, We Go Way Back], there were all these people standing around, the smoke machines were going and my actors were totally freaking out. I started fantasizing: 'God, what if I could shoot a movie completely in order? What if there'd be no weird lighting equipment? What if I could create a fiction film that felt like a fly-on-the-wall documentary? That's what I was going for: Pure naturalism. "Everybody works for very little [on my films]. Then if I make money, or the producer makes money, we all make money. Everyone gets a piece. … One of the things I wanted to explore [on Touchy Feely] was: Could I keep the intimate feel- ing of my tiny, family-style film sets where everybody is really excited to be there and on the same page, and it's a really positive experience for everybody? People of all dif- ferent stripes from all different departments came up to me and said they just had a great time, and it made me really happy to hear that." INDEPENDENT VOICES "I think what made Precious so true is that, down to the wallpaper, I worked from a snapshot of the room that I grew up in. I knew exactly where the paint was going to chip from the wall." "I don't have any problem walking away from some- thing very lucrative that won't let me make the movie as I want. There's no choice at all, no hesitation."