David Mamet on film

yet a question is what he do to get somebody to suspend their disbelief that's a central question and drama and the answer in dramas you've got to give them a plot they have to make them wonder what happens next and I guess it's the central question in magic and confidence games - right well in both I mean you're exerting ultimate control so whatever you're letting them see you're making them say you're controlling what it is that they see right and consequently hoping to control how they react I got this theory that suddenly the part of the mind that is different dealing with the drama and dealing with reality it's absolutely a part of the brain it's physiologically a different part of your brain that you do when you're involved in a drama when you're involved in a confidence game or when you're involved in a magic effect because what you're doing is as you say you're trying to use the mind of to lead itself on to defeat itself so that physiologically something's being released into your bloodstream to try to figure out a problem what happens next how is he going to get out of the locked cage what's going to happen to a fellow and that this goes back to very very primal kind of the essence of the cerebral cortex of how do I get away from the wolf that's trying to kill me which is very very different than figuring out a logical problem I think it's absolutely two different parts of the brain and do you think it kicks in or that it's developed no it kicks in it kicks in when subconsciously you can make the audience be involved it's the Socratic method why the Socratic method is better than the [ __ ] University system because you make make the student ask the question so that they are they are not no longer functioning as a quote intellectual which is to say [ __ ] but rather they're functioning as an animal right the forest is on fire how do I get out of here well they say you know good luck is the residue of good design but you know when we're in love or when we're inspired or when we're angry of when we're neurotic we tend to see the universe in terms of an overriding perception the question is what is fate and what's coincidence so as they you know fate is the fool's word for chance Robin Spielberg Robin Spielberg another an old Atlantic person that's the question in drama is what-what-what's coincidental and as the hero gets drawn farther and farther into the story he's less and less inclined to write off things to coincidence and he starts to perceive a pattern which is what we all do in life sometimes it's called experience sometimes it's called neurosis and I was just I was looking at this movie Lugosi Lev you see look they call it daybreak in the United States Jung Caban he kills his girlfriend's lover and he's all holed up as an apartment overnight and it's all about props and he knows he just has like 45 minutes to live it all in the world he wants as a cigarette the cops are outside they're going to kill him at daybreak and he runs out of matches so if you look at what Mark Marcel carné did in that movie it's so much if it has to do with with the props and showing the prop well it's like magic right you should a prop once what does it mean you show the proper twice that must mean something you sure to prop the third time and it pays off in a way that you didn't expect so the idea here is in a confidence game as in a movie his ideas are planted early early on and they pay off later on the audience goes oh yeah I remember it's hard to write a drama because it's hard to write a drama with a plot because the plot means that you have to at the end of the drama resolve that problem which gave rise to the drama in such a way that it's both surprising and inevitable as per Aristotle the thing is can you turn the film around in the last 10 seconds one of the hardest things in the world to do I mean notably night channel and did it in in the sixth sense it's very very hard to do and we did it here and I felt myself very very lucky to have done it so I'd like to say something about working with you Ricky on this movie which is the the actual asking for the money when they actually go to her for the money is just so outrageous so of course the whole movie is building up to ask an adopter Ford for the money or getting her to suggest that she give the money and I kept saying no you know it's so brash it'll never work and I believe it was you Rick who said the movie in this is exactly like the confidence game you build up you build up you build up and at some point you just got to go for the money a sergei eisenstein who you guys will remember from the the Matrix movies came up with the term the zero point and he said there's a point about twice in every movie I would be between the first and second I'm between the second third act when the action stops for a second it has to be we everything rests like between realms and has to be reinvented reinvigorated by a recrudescence of one of the elements of the plot and here is i here we go what about that as he speaks it is the house of games chip which is the recrudescence of of the action and this is done today in television by narration so as so as everybody says what do you do when you start the second act remind the audience who loves who and who hates who so that's what we're doing here at the start of the second act what are the stakes who loves who who hates who the wonderful thing Max Reinhardt used to call seems a tree scene where a tree scene was a scene that's you hang everything on all the information you can't get an elsewhere you hang out like ornaments on a Christmas tree so the idea is you go back over everything you learned in act 1 and act 2 and you find that it wasn't what you seem the car wasn't what you see the people on what you see this bar wasn't what it seemed nobody was what it seemed what there's new information oh how about that a flashback God forgive me I can't believe I actually had a flesh but one way to go to hell the audience should remember you shouldn't have to tell them they either saw it or they didn't but I guess I broke what I'll now characterises the first rule of this movie which is never have a flashback you know what you can break all the rules always and anything that you do you have to re-establish at times and their various ways to do it well those 20 seconds will not make you go into the into the filmmakers hell indeed well Trudy Shipp great great cutter who cut this movie said there's no there's no rules and filmmaking there's just one law don't be boring you know when you do it you direct in a movie you the first thing and the most important thing is of our people dependable because you're going too fast and the great spirit of a movie making the greater is the great American spirit of you bet when you direct a movie one of my wonderful discoveries this first movie I directed was that everybody will work themselves to death for the movie directing of film is one of the oddest occupations in the world because you spend so much time planning and if you've directed before you spend so much time saying I'm never going to make that mistake again and then when you start directing a film it cannot be an homage to anybody else you got to make that film you're going to take the plan however good it is and you're going to take your ability to execute that plan however good it is and then in effect make an improvisation based upon your inability to completely fulfill that plan and I always feel rather unequal to the task that is that one cannot study hard enough and long enough to be able to make the film because just so much to know and the more you prepare it the more you find out did you storyboard this whole thing yeah sure do you still yeah there's your storyboard artist II is the same one I'll use a lot of them but the interesting thing about storyboards is after you get done storyboarding it you never really look at them again because the whole purpose of storyboarding is you know what the shot is so you got it in your mind so if there's fifteen hundred two thousand shots on a movie you know what they are so when you get on the set this was a nice shootout we did I liked it sure maybe I rehearsed the [ __ ] out of him I mean like when Michael Mann did heat he did the big shootout downtown LA they closed off the street and rehearsed it for a week and he videotaped everything cuz you on the day you have to know exactly what the shots are cuz you can't make it up as you go along yeah acting is like homeopathic medicine in what way you may ask and I would answer in all ways next question no I'm kidding that the whole idea of homeopathic medicine is the smaller the dose of the more effective it is so what you don't want actors to do is to narrate what they think the quote character is doing what they think the quote character is feeling how they think the story is unfolding what you want actors to do is to be as simple as possible love that banister in achieving the small tasks scene by seeing that the author has indicated and it's not that less is more that means less that means more is better but less is bad so what you want to do in a story is take away everything such that if you took away one more thing the story would not make sense and so what you want to do in a confidence game is exactly the same thing because obviously disappoint which if you start narrating to the mark the mark is going to say always and why you telling me this so you want to do just enough to let the mark form the idea in his or her own mind this is how a drama works it's how psychoanalysis works it's how hypnotism works and it's how the con game works in our magic works when I walked into your class I was I hadn't thought anything about technique I hadn't even I don't think the word had ever crossed my lips it was shocking to think about studying it as a science I remember that was your whole thing to bring all the to take all the art out of it to get all the guesswork out of it to get all the magic out of it to make it something concrete and repeatable and scientific and it was a life-changing thing really absolutely it was yes absolutely right I read this wonderful book but it's guy called Malcolm Gladwell about outliers and he's so why people become successful and he says oh yeah that they practice something they're pressure these times he says why he says if you look at the greatest hockey players in Canada over 30 years he says I'm gonna give you some statistics on them figure out what's what's funny they were all born in January or February because the cutoff date for youth hockey was January 1st so they were a year older than everybody so of course they were coordinated they got more coaching blah blah blah he says look at the Beatles he says they went the hamburg and they played like 14 hours a night for three years and so it's like I'm look at you guys we all work together for you know how many years a trillion plays a trillion plays trillion movies radio constantly for years I was playing around with this thing that sandy Meisner made up with the neighborhood players called the repeating game and it took me 30 years to realize that was that was a useless training exercise boof we did it forever and did he hate being called the repeating game it was the RIP repetition exercise oh yeah that was a bunch of [ __ ] but the I I spent most of my it might have you can't tell you it passed the time did pass the time yeah but I came more and more to realize that that what acting to me came down to teaching is teaching somebody how to look at a scene and then to teach someone to analyze what the scene was actually about you know in such a way that could be done that it was a physical it came down to a physical action and then after that where the method was wrong was that it wasn't neither the teacher nor the director's job to induce the actor to play the [ __ ] scene if they didn't want to play the [ __ ] scene what was he doing there so that what so that what I came to as Liz is let's let's find people actually want to act I'll tell them what little I know but analyzing the scene and then they'll go off and they'll make their voice better and the you know they'll work on their posture and then let him jump in you know people are entitled to have tastes I mean I look at these OHS who films and looks like the actors aren't doing anything is there genius and the actors that I like or the actors who are um who the [ __ ] knows what it is that they're doing they just one can't stop watching them because it's simple and honest and truth from the letting the play unfold rather than telling you what they they're good ideas and that you look at most of the people down through the contemporary history who've been called the world's greatest actors most of a little bunch of phonies in my estimation so I know that's wrong a right but I know that I'm entitled to my tastes so this so this is I love this scene is great the standalone scenery huge fight with Roger Deakins about this well I [ __ ] seen because the reveal of the girl I'd worked out of my storyboard so he's gonna reveal the girl which is the way we did it here but he said normally can't do with that we have to move the camera I said if you move the cambium you'd lose in the whole point which is you're signifying to the audience that something's gonna happen as soon as the camera starts to move again there's no shock involved I quote you a lot the only film I directed I was complaining about the DP saying that my shots were boring and you said listen to me if you ever hear anybody use the term interesting on your set disregard that person for the rest of the shoot the words you want to hear are simple direct and clear not interest yeah well yeah especially the DP a DP always wants to make the shot interesting so a lot of work with DPS who are very very talented people most of them work with this tilt getting to [ __ ] shut up and do it the way you tell them I mean like he'll hear them out but a lot of times they they want to make the shot interesting well the DP wants to shoot pretty pictures and the costumer wants beautiful costumes and the everybody wants something different than the director wants which is to tell the story that's not their job either I mean the the great ones know how to fit into telling the story but it's really hard not to put your attention on making your specific thing shine even if it's at the detriment of the film yeah also you got to make sure that the tepees not gonna set you up in such a way that you can't cut it when you get into the cutting room cuz the shots so pretty mm-hmm well helps to have you know along my own horn for a second actually helps to have good writing cuz the better the writing is the less hard people work at it and as we know from TV you know the worse the writing is the more you up there kind of trying to push the [ __ ] boulder uphill I know I think I can do something with this scene yeah that's always the kiss of death yeah it's hard to write a script yeah it is hard to write a script yeah well film was on myth that's all film is you know it's a dream it's a it's a it's a dream put down and projected on a bed sheet you know type up on a wall it's it's mythological and the extent that which is mythological it's powerful and so the people try to try to pervert him to being reasonable but what we remember from Lawrence Arabia is not all that stupid [ __ ] sand but this guy riding up to the to the well for a half an hour on it was either a camel or a very large cat

Channel: filmschoolcomments

Views: 52,936

Keywords: film school, film education, film analysis, film theory, film class, film lecture, movies, cinematography, director of photography, filmmaking, coverage, continuity, editing, directing, storytelling, writing, screenwriting, script, film technique, filmmaking style, film angles, alfred hitchcock, vsevolod pudovkin, sergei eisenstein, andre bazin, david mamet, william h macy, ricky jay, psychoanalysis, Le jour se lève, Marcel Carné, Jacques Viot, Jean Gabin

Id: vj5LUTZ1H9A

Length: 15min 1sec (901 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 01 2013