Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/618780
dga quarterly 31 SCREENPULLS: (TOP TO BOTTOM) 20TH CENTURY FOX HOME ENT.; PARAMOUNT HOME VIDEO; UNIVERSAL STUDIOS HOME ENT. James Cameron | Titanic (1997) >We had given ourselves an eight-day window to shoot this in the afternoons, which gave us eight bites at the apple to get a sunset. We had horrible, bald, blue skies seven days in a row, where the sun went down to the horizon with just no character whatsoever. On the eighth day, the sun burst out and we got this in- credible golden light on the actors. At the time we were shooting another scene, and Kate [Winslet] had to go through a complete wardrobe, wig, and corset change, then race back to the set. When she jumped onto the ladder she took one look at the sun and turned and yelled at me as loud as she could, 'SHOOT! SHOOT NOW!' [laughs] I'd never heard an actress do that before. Amy Heckerling | Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) >There was a lot of drug use in the movie, but the studio was fine with it—it was all in the script, and they wanted us to tell it like it is. The scene in Spicoli's bedroom where he's getting stoned was probably shot in no more than half a day. The set was, like, two cheesy walls. At first, Spicoli [Sean Penn] is on the phone talking to Eric Stoltz's char- acter, who was only supposed to be a voice on the phone. At one point, Sean hits himself in the head with his shoe and says, 'That was my skull! I'm so wasted!' I wanted to keep that, but I didn't want to be stuck on that one shot. So I thought, we'd better get Eric on camera. We ran around the stages, found a bathroom set and put him in there. It was very much 'What's here, and how can we use it?' John Badham | Saturday Night Fever (1977) >This is not just a dance, it's the major turning point of the film. With dance, and certainly with action, you can compose shots to the way the figures go because they're in motion—it makes for beautiful composition. This is a very gentle move, to give you the geography of the place and the mood without being static. The biggest thing we did was put in that floor. Simple electron- ics made the lights go to the beat of the music, but it was better to do it manually, so we could be exactly in sync with what the dancers were doing. Here we're going with as much romanticism as we could.