Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1097515
DGA QUARTERLY 41 audience can track all of the characters, not only on an emotional level, but you have to just spatially track them through the film, be- cause this is very dense. Q: Is that what dictates a bit like that airport fight, when the two sides come to a line-in-the-sand moment before they actually run at each other? Does that reorient everyone geographically? J: One hundred percent. It's like watching sports. The audience's brain can only hold so much visual information. We need to spatial- ly orientate them, and then maintain that line as much as possible throughout the sequence. Lens choices are dictated by geography versus emotion. Obviously, we're getting in a lot tighter if we need an emotional moment out of a character. Certain fights, hand-to- hand fights, look a lot better on tighter lenses than they do on wider lenses for us. It's just the way we like to do it. Q: How do you two work as brothers who direct together? A: I think every directing team works differently, in the same way every individual director works differently from another one. It's really a function of personality and process. So yeah, for Joe and I, we don't divide any duties. We both like to be pres- ent for everything. We very much move through the process together. And that's how we like to do things. We have a real shorthand with one another. We both talk to everybody. We always look at it as our responsibility to stay on the same page so that we don't confuse anyone. And that's our approach to it. Q: Does that extend to the way you view the DGA? A: We're people who like community, and since we came from a million miles away from the film business, the DGA became our first community in Hollywood. This was in the '90s, when the DGA had come up with all kinds of adaptations to their regulations to incorporate and welcome indie filmmakers and make it possible for people like that to work. So we participated on the Indepen- dent Directors Committee for many years early on, and we would do a lot of outreach to non-DGA members at different film festivals, to tell people they could join even if they thought they were no- where in the zone of being able to do that. Look, I used to be a member of [a labor union], and our grandfather worked in the steel mills all his life. Coming from Cleveland, the unions are a part of your social pattern. Q: Have any directors' action sequences, and how they made them, influenced you? A: When Joe and I became filmmakers, our back- ground was as film geeks. We grew up near a won- derful cinematheque in Cleveland, and that was our film education. We didn't grow up messing around with cameras. We just loved movies. J: And studied them. A: Almost in an academic way, if not formally aca- demic. So we're not as familiar with the processes people used as we are with the end product. J: We would sit with the VHS tape—we're that old—and rewind to watch the car chase in The French Connection over and over, study how [William Friedkin] made his edits, how he used sound to drive the edit, how certain angles created more tension than others. We took ourselves to film school. Watch Good- fellas a hundred times and you'll learn more than you ever could in film school. Q: Who wanted to be a director first? J: It was a communal decision. He was in law school, and I was get- ting an acting degree. Robert Rodriguez had just made El Mariachi and we read a book about how he spent $7,000 to do it. Suddenly it became attainable to a bunch of wannabes around the country. A: I was unhappy with what I was doing, and I remember the mo- ment he said to me, "Why don't you go to directing school?" I said, "There's such a thing as directing school?" J: We were a million miles from the film business. We had no con- nections. When we made Pieces in 1994, nobody in Cleveland knew how to make a movie. Our film sat undeveloped in a refrigerator in our garage for six months because we couldn't afford to get it de- veloped. If there had been a power outage, we would have lost the entire movie. Q: How did your credit card movie get in front of Steven Soderbergh's eyes? A: We brought [Pieces] to the IFFM (Independent Feature Film Market) in New York, where you pay a couple hundred dollars and screen your movie. We filled the theater. By the end of the movie, two-thirds had walked out, except one person stopped, and it was Jon Fitzgerald, who was one of the original founders of the Slamdance Film Festival. He said: "I dug your movie. You guys should apply to our festival." We go to Slamdance. Same thing. We did a whole campaign, we Anthony and Joe Russo, with actor Frank Grillo, on Captain America: Civil War; opposite, from left, Joe, Anthony and Chris Evans, who plays the title role in Captain America: The Winter Soldier.