Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/618780
30 dga quarterly SCREENPULLS: (TOP) WARNER HOME VIDEO; (BOTTOM) PARAMOUNT PICTURES HOME ENT. "I didn't want to mute the intensity of the scene or make excuses for it. The movie was made for the veterans, and if I had done it any other way it wouldn't have been anything close to resembling what they survived." —STEVEN SPIELBERG William Friedkin | The Exorcist (1973) >In the novel, William Peter Blat- ty's description of Father Merrin [Max von Sydow] arriving outside the home of the child's mother says he was standing under a streetlight in a misty glow 'like a melancholy traveler frozen in time.' I had to find a way to visualize that, and I allowed a full day to light the scene. We used arc lights and Troupers to light the street, in addition to boosting the practical lighting like the streetlamps. After a great deal of trial and error, we filmed on the second night. The painting that inspired me was René Magritte's The Empire of Light that depicted a small house at night lit by a streetlamp, but the sky in the painting is flat-out daylight. It's an amazing surrealis- tic image. I'll be honest with you, if I was making The Exorcist today, I still wouldn't use much CGI. Steven Spielberg | Saving Private Ryan (1998) >Capt. Miller [Tom Hanks] finally makes it ashore, but a mortar shell exploding nearby basically rang his bell. I wondered what it would be like for him to observe these massive losses without hearing the screams or all the whistling shells, would it be even more horrific? I had to shoot [the D-Day invasion sequence] one step at a time because that's the way the Rangers took the beach: one inch at a time. As a result, I was able to make up this whole sequence as I went along, to come up with shots on the spur of the moment. It helped make things a little more chaotic and unpredictable.