Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/798465
32 DGA QUARTERLY PHOTOS: PHOTOFEST his opinion. This was about me coming back to England after eight years. So all of them were a loose reflection of myself. Q: After starting out in theater, how big was the transition into film, in terms of your technical skills? What were the biggest challenges? A: The biggest challenge was rhythm. I was used to working in the very controllable environment of the theater, and suddenly in film you're lucky if you get two minutes of useable material in a day. It took me a long time to not be frustrated by that rhythm. I think the director's brain—whether you can see things in sequential im- ages, whether you can edit in your head—that's either there or not. Some stage directors possess that and can step quite easily into that world and some don't. Then beyond that, it's about learning by osmosis, by asking ques- tions and by watching. You have to be able to conjure the shape of a film and hold it in your head, even if it changes—and I mean literally the physical shape. Sometimes with a bigger film like Bond you have to hold the shape for two years in your head—for long, long periods when you are spending days, sometimes weeks, on literally seconds of screen time, and trying to work out what you need and what is useful and what is useless and what you can do without. Those are the things that are most difficult: It's keeping your arms around the whole thing. Q: Who taught you most about the process? A: Well, to me, the great teachers are the great directors. If you're willing to watch and really study, you can find out so much. And so my masters are everyone's masters, the great directors, from Ozu to Welles to Truffaut to Coppola to Ang Lee, from Steven Soderbergh to David Fincher; these are the people who even now are teaching me. I watched Fincher's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo again the other night and I marveled at the poise and the balance and the precision and the absolute confidence of the storytelling. It's not a movie I would have made myself, not a subject matter I'm particularly drawn to, but you need to recognize class when you see it. Paul Thomas Anderson—I could watch some of the camera moves in There Will Be Blood over and over again; it's poetry, he's a master. Q: So that's where you learn, the other stuff is technical, but that's not the important stuff. A: Of course, I've learned masses from [American Beauty and Road to Perdition DP] Conrad Hall, from [Skyfall DP] Roger Deakins, and on my last movie from [Spectre editor] Lee Smith. I've learned from people like Chris Corbould, the head of special effects on the Bond movies, and [composer] Tom Newman. But they are collaborators, and that's different, because you're learning from each other, and if you are any good, you keep pushing each other. But in terms of really having your eyes open to the possibilities of cinema, you have to watch the great directors, and I suppose that's what makes me sad when I feel like there are less and less examples of that. There are so many images being put in front of you, so many stories being told, so much visual eye candy, that it's difficult to find those extraordinary beacons that you can mentally refer to. Q: When you're making a film, are you sometimes conscious of do- ing something that someone else has already done—for example, with Jarhead and Kubrick? A: Oh, of course, super aware. Being in a Marine barracks with a drill sergeant, I could not have been unaware of Full Metal Jacket. Even now I look at it and think, not a bad attempt, but it's no Full Metal Jacket. But you don't often find yourself in an absolutely identical set— because, guess what, those barracks all look the same. The only way me and Roger [Deakins] could work out how to do it differently was handheld, but we were doing the whole movie handheld so it didn't have the same level of precision and control. Q: Do you sometimes feel the weight of influence as a burden you've got to try and get away from? A: I think I did when I started. But I was lucky enough to be in the room when Alan Ball dropped that screenplay, American Beauty, and it had a very articulate visual language written into the very fabric of the story, and at one point I thought he had stolen it from someone else, it just seemed to be completely original. Of course when I walked up to the front garden of the Burnham house on the first day of shoot- ing, the house that Kevin Spacey's character and Annette Bening 's character occupied, with the white picket fence and the roses, I re- member thinking, "Oh gosh, Blue Velvet. Can I do this?" But then I thought, "Well, picket fences and red roses existed before Blue Velvet, and they will exist after this movie as well," and if you are going to be influenced, you might as well be influenced by a masterpiece. Then I watched the way that got regenerated and regurgitated in turn by the more popular culture, for example, how American Beauty influenced Desperate Housewives. Influence is everything, you are look- ing forward and looking back—you watch La La Land and you get more pleasure out of it because you remember Singin' in the Rain and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. You don't get less enjoyment, you get more. "I would say that each [of my films] reflects where I was in my life at that time."