DGA Monthly

2 2 I D G A M O N T H L Y 11 — continued on page 25 14 9 Editor Kevin Tent and I are big fans of dissolves—here, very long ones. We've used them in all our pictures. They allow you to blend images together just as images in real life kind of blend into one another. There's beauty as one image evanesces and the other one achieves full potency, like life and death. As a child of the '70s and someone who has spent his career trying to make '70s movies, I adore dissolves and scratch my head at their absence in most contemporary movies. It's a technique that precedes the cinema itself—it existed with magic lanterns. Here, they function to suggest both the passage of time and Miles's descent into a drunken stupor. I had figured a priori that we would be using them in cutting since we always do. Here we needed them to help suggest a four-hour evening in only twelve minutes. Kevin and I spent a very long time calibrating these dissolves. 9 14 10 As you shoot a scene with the camera able to float around and snatch bits of performance out of the air, the Actors do wonderful things, and you hope the camera will be at the right place at the right time. Here, Miles lifts his glass to drink, and you can see Maya looking at him through it, her concern growing. You can't design that. It just happened. This was still in the era when we would shoot on film, edit digitally, then cut negative. This scene was so intricate in its editing and use of dissolves that we had, of course, to print it as a separate piece of film and stick that into the negative, picking up a little bit of grain in the process, but who cares? Kevin and I like cinematic elegance. We never want technique to call attention to itself, or to us. You simply want to tell the story as effectively as possible. So, using techniques like dissolves— which are nothing new—was appropriate. But this sequence is probably the most abstract, experiential and subjective in any film I've made so far. 10 14 11 The sequence is a four-hander but the primary relationship is between Jack and Miles. Jack's goal is to allow the evening to go so well so that he and Stephanie can wind up in bed. He even warns Miles outside—don't sabotage me and don't go to the dark side. But Miles gets drunk and sprints to the dark side, which is when Jack reaches out his hand to prevent Miles from pouring himself another glass of wine, and shoots him a withering, scolding look. Thomas Haden Church was extremely good in this scene, I feel. He was really on those two days. This may be my favorite shot in the whole sequence. As he reproaches Miles later, we learn that it was Miles himself who sabotaged his own marriage with an affair, and that fact is the source of much of Miles's self-hatred. 11 Shot to Remember: Sideways — continued from page 20 CELEBRATING THE CRAFT

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