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68 dga quarterly Q: After that you undertook a massive project, the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Summer Olympics. How did you approach something as big as that as a director? A: You can't be a different person. Fundamen- tal principles always apply: Surround yourself with great people and try to inspire them. The rest is Mr. Wilder's Nine Commandments: 'Thou shalt not bore.' And his Tenth: 'Thou shalt have right of final cut.' We wanted to make the experience acute for the audience in the stadium believing that would then somehow transmit to the audience at home. So they weren't witnessing a billion person experience but something more personal and touching. About a year beforehand we did a dry run with a production of Frankenstein broadcast live from the National Theatre in London with all the same crew. That got us focused on the importance of the live tactile experience dominating rather than the big el- bows … of live TV coverage. Q: Are you the kind of director who likes to do a lot of takes? A: You read about Kubrick doing 70, 80 takes, but I try to do under 10. I'm happy sometimes just doing two. I have done one, but it's obviously very risky for all sorts of rea- sons. I like to do rehearsals and I hope that when actors arrive at a scene they feel confi- dent. I clear the crew when the actors arrive, so they have total control of the set. Some- times I might bring the cameraman in or the script supervisor or somebody like that if nec- essary. But basically it's theirs. They can do what they want. I can suggest blocking and ways of staging the scene, but the best way is to have a plan but not to revert to it till you need to. The best things tend to happen on [shooting] day. The energy of the day itself, knowing this is your one chance at it, makes everybody different anyway. Q: Do you set up the action and the actors and just keep the camera out of it? How in- trusive do you want the camera to be? A: It really depends on the material. Some- times, you've just got to, as cleverly as pos- sible, let the camera observe. But at other times you have to build the scene out to cer- tain angles, which are very particular. It's al- ways difficult to explain, but you can feel the scene, that it should happen in a certain way. In that case you have to constantly try to il- lustrate it to people. Not by acting it yourself, but by showing them where you're going to place the camera, so that they know it's go- ing to be beneath them and they're going to be on top of it, or it's distant, watching them through a crack in the door. It's about ex- pressing the feeling you have as a storyteller of how you want the scene to be conveyed. And again, sometimes it's healthy to do a number of takes where you have deliberate variation. Actors help to prep you for edit- ing, giving you alternatives. When you start off your career you think there's only one way of achieving anything, but when you get to work with really experienced actors, they'll give emotional differences between scenes—hotter, cooler—so that you have choices in the editing. It's been interesting with actors like Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet who I've just been working with on Steve Jobs. They're brilliant at find- ing variation in multiple takes, rather than just doing the same thing again and again. Q: Speaking of Steve Jobs, that's another major about-turn for you. A biopic about a quintessential American character, with a script by Aaron Sorkin. Did you feel at all inhibited in the way you work? A: Well, you wouldn't want to mess around with it. It's a wonderful script. I never read a script like it. It's not pictorial storytelling; it's essentially actors talking to one another. As it's mainly dialogue, you have an enormous amount of freedom in one sense. In another sense you don't, because it's very clear what [Aaron] means. I guess the challenge was to find actors who could do it, really. And that's what we set out to do. So it's been exciting like nothing I've ever done before. Are we all min- nows floundering in the Steve Jobs pool? I don't know. I can't tell you much more about it than that, other than it's been an extraordi- nary kind of privilege to be able to do it. Q: What kind of shooting style did you adapt for Steve Jobs? Did you use the West Wing style of walk-and-talk? A: Actually we looked at Social Network more than West Wing. I was flabbergasted to discov- er how much of that movie was sitting down. A major motion picture where most of the cast is sitting most of the time and when they do stand it's for significant reason. So we de- cided to make a film where if anyone sat down it had enormous significance. A standing-up movie. Funny, because Jobs loved to walk and talk. Technically doing that within the three buildings where the film takes place was an enormous challenge for sound and lighting, most especially sound as there are 200 pages of dazzling dialogue coming at you, and al- most as many corners and staircases and blind alleys to block radio transmissions. [Our] real interest was not the clean and precise technol- ogy but the emotional hinterland of the char- acters—damaged by their own single minded- ness—and whether they can be saved. Q: You mentioned earlier about coming to the DGA to screen Shallow Grave. Later on, you won the DGA Award for Slumdog. How did that affect you? A: It's quite weird as a director how little you know other directors. I don't think I'm alone in saying that. You think we should get to- gether, but we don't. So it's a chance to get together in an informal way—and obviously it's in lovely circumstances, because you've all been nominated. [At the nominees' fea- ture film symposium] when you're answering questions, you realize everybody in that room knows exactly what you're talking about. Hav- ing that community, and being able to speak to that community, is lovely, especially as you rattle on about all the technical stuff because you know it makes sense to them. But the amazing thing is that the DGA Award is not just for direction; it's actually for the whole directing team. It's for the 1st AD and unit production manager, so actually the people who do a lot of the work get rec- ognition. Normally when you do interviews if you talk about the fact it's all teamwork, everybody's eyes glaze over. But when you come to the DGA Awards, you bring your 1st AD with you. And in our circumstance on Slumdog, to be able to bring the guy who made all the difference in the world to the film; my 1st Raj Acharya, was wonderful. And to make that connection between Bol- lywood and Hollywood like that was a really special moment. Of all the awards, actually, it's the one that you feel most strongly about, because you're literally given it by the direc- tor who won last year. To get an award from the Coen brothers is like, holy shit! ® DA N N Y B OY L E Continued from page 35