Roger Corman's Filmmaking Process

well you mentioned that in order for the for the films to be successful they had to be made on tight tight budgets so many of your colleagues and you yourself have talked over the years about how important pre-production is to making your films can you talk a little bit about what the pre-production process was like for you on films made that you were directing yourself but also that you were producing yes well I'll start with the actual production we were generally shooting on a 10-day schedule with budgets of 6070 thousand dollars sometimes less sometimes a little more and my theory was this and it may go back to the engineering that when you're shooting at they're on a tight schedule like that you don't have time to make important decisions you've got to just shoot but you have all the time in the world in pre-production so when I was directing and then working with the HUD directors who started with me emphasized the importance of pre-production because you had all the time you needed to make your key decisions for instance to lay out your shots in advance so you don't come on the set the first day and say where am I going to put the camera you come on to set the first day you know where you're going to put the camera and you follow your production plan knowing that you'll never follow that plan 100% shot you thought of doesn't work or you get a better idea on the set but if you have everything laid out in advance you can follow that schedule say 80 to 90% and then improvised the other so as you continue to make films into the 21st century all of the the equipment and the technology that's being used to make movies is changing from using film cameras to now digital cameras can you talk a little bit about the the differences in using those different digital tools I mean on set but also in the special effects area that so many of your films have have explored you in the actual shooting you can work much faster and more efficiently not only with the cameras with the digital cameras which are lighter more portable easier to work with but also sound your lights are smaller your grip equipment and so forth so you can shoot much easier and much faster today with the improved lightweight equipment during post-production however it turns around a little bit because when you were shooting with film you say you say to the crew and also to your script clerk alright print take 4 or print of your big time take 14 whatever you print that one take and you go into the editing room and you're working with all the takes and director is picked but one take for each shot when you shoot digitally it is not worth the bother in transferring to go to the take you want it's cheaper to print everything which means that the director gets in to the editing room and instead of just working with one take for a shot he may have five takes per shot and suddenly he's looking at all of them and saying hey I like take two even though I said print take eight or something like that and so you're slowing down the process the other thing of course is digital effects primarily computer graphics the quality is phenomenal it's so much better than anything we ever used but frankly it takes forever I'm finishing up a picture this is death race 2000 I'm finishing up a picture for universal death race twenty fifty fifty years later and the the crashes the stunts and everything will be real but there will also be computer graphics oh they'll be much better but as usual we're behind schedule on the computer graphics ever every picture I've ever done with computer graphics has been behind schedule

Channel: Oscars

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Id: zjgLiHGhkFY

Length: 4min 33sec (273 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 27 2016