Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1097515
76 DGA QUARTERLY real estate dedicated to something, that's go- ing to be the hard part to fool. So the brain is really good at physics and facial recognition. C: And facial interpretation… F: Of emotion. C: So is it somebody that's going to kill me? Is it somebody that's going to give me a present or feed me? Or… F: Your survival when you're an infant is based on all of that. So it's very hard to fool those things, which is why it's easier to do a lion than the human face. C: Sure. Creatures are relatively straight- forward. F: And so that made me not scared of Jungle Book, because on Jungle Book I knew that I had the kid there to cut to. And in Lion King, I can't cut to the kid. And so even though you may have had whatever it was, 1,600 shots in Jungle Book, where you are looking on that screen was generally something that was real. C: Yeah. It was tangible, and the lighting set the lighting for the scene. F: Now there's nowhere to hide, so I'm in your world again. Which is hard; there was a learning curve. And I felt like with Jungle Book, when I was done with that, I fi nally knew how to do it. [But] I didn't know how to do it when I started. You learn on the job. And then at that point, that's when I sought out Lion King because I was ready… C: I shadowed you that day. And you went into a big session with the animators and the creature designers, and you were so meticulous and specifi c about the di erent faces of the di erent animals. There was the panther, the tiger, and it was all approached from character. I thought it was just really interesting to watch how you did it. And it really reminded me a lot of what I go through on a daily basis, dealing with "What does everybody look like, and what does it mean?" Every change you make means something. And I think a lot of people look at directors who do imaginative stu , like you're sitting on some high-res version of a movie that already exists in your mind, and you're just stumbling to try to explain it. But that's not what it is. There's an out- of-focus picture, and when you see some- thing that looks like the picture in your head, but it brings it more into focus, you say, "Do that." That to me is selection. F: Whereas you were very iterative when I've visited you on the set. That's the other good thing about acting—you get to be on other people's sets and really apprentice quietly, silently in the background, you pick up on things. And watching Marty (Scorsese on The Wolf of Wall Street), he much more has an instinct, tries it, will do lots of takes, lets it evolve. C: There are a lot of downsides to perfor- mance-capture work because it's tedious, it's very detailed. But the upside is you get the performance and it can be take 4 or take 6 or whatever. Once you have that performance, now you start worrying about lighting, now you start worrying about photography. And you can blow your move fi ve times, but you haven't hurt the performance. I've found that, interestingly enough, actors, when they're free in a performance- capture space, tend to move around later- ally a lot more. And it's true behavior vs. camera-specifi c behavior. F: But I contend that we are not trying to emulate real life. We're trying to emulate a real movie, at least for now. Because you remember we used to add grain all the time with old TV shows when they went from fi lm to digital. C: Yeah. F: They went to the Genesis (digital cam- era), it would add fi lm grain. C: You know, I fi nd the hardest aspect of directing, when you're fi nishing a fi lm, is to always be able to react to the cut like you're seeing it for the fi rst time. And I've found that the AVID actually worked against us as a community. F: Because you see it... it's too easy to try things. C: When you had to physically splice fi lms, you didn't make tiny changes to the cut of a scene 100 times. You kind of just cut it, you know? F: Well, audiences are very sophisticated now. I feel like the lighting has gotten better, the editing's gotten so precise. And people can metabolize a lot more cuts and a lot more information. C: But it has an anxiety-producing e ect sometimes, or a distancing e ect. I admire when I see a fi lmmaker who knows how to slow down and smell the co ee, and then speed up and go like hell. Close-up discipline is another thing. When everything's a close-up, nothing's a close-up. And I know—you do that well. You really get way out and then you come into a nice medium that's reading the whole group… F: I think push-ins, also. You look at The Godfather and I think there's two push-ins in that whole fi lm. C: Yeah. And they're overused. F: Because it's so easy to make something feel compelling. And then just like a close- up, you do it too much... it's like seasoning. If you hold back and save it when you fi nally go to it, it creates a visceral reaction. And I think what's important—and I know we both agree on this—is that all of this tech- nology is purely a way to access the human- ity in the audience. And because, ultimately, we are look- ing for some sort of connection. Because we're such a communal species, that we're looking to either learn from one another or experience something vicariously through somebody doing something. So you can learn on a really subconscious level by seeing somebody go through some sort of trial and persevering and being rewarded for that. C: I always think it's a simulation—a big emotional simulator. And we get to project CONTINUED FROM PAGE 35