00:12I was able to get my hands on an 8mm camera at one point, a friend of mine had it,
00:17and
00:17I shot a little silly film on the rooftops of the Lower East Side back I think in 1962
00:25or so, but the very idea of making a film, a narrative film, even though I was aware of
00:36all the excitement around me, and maybe because of that too, the excitement of the American
00:42underground cinema, the American avant-garde, European avant-garde, all these things were
00:47developing and were being available now, that cinema could be anything, cinema was anything
00:53you make it. All these things fed the desire to make a narrative film. I wanted to make
01:01a narrative film. And when I finally saw the film Shadows by John Cassavetes, I think it
01:11was 1959 or 1960, what it proved to us was that if you had a desire to tell a story
01:18as strongly
01:20as he had, and you were able to break away, or not even be encumbered, should I say, not
01:27be encumbered by a studio system, a way of, the industry way of making a film with a very
01:38big crew, very, very heavy equipment. And that was, that was, that was stopping the creative
01:45impulse in a way. So what happened was that there was very lightweight equipment. This
01:49enabled the filmmakers like Cassavetes, like Shirley Clark, like many others, to be able
01:54to just open up the field and shoot almost as if you have today, for example, an iPhone
02:00film would be a similar thing. And so these became truly, truly independent films. You
02:07realize there were no more excuses. If they were able to make a film this way in New York,
02:11in 16 millimeter, the camera didn't have a tripod and that sort of thing. Very, very little
02:15lighting, maybe none. There's no excuse now. You have to be able to do it. But the only thing
02:20you need, and this is the most important thing, is the spark and the desire and the passion to,
02:26to say something utilizing film. It turns out that where, and it's some, it's difficult to,
02:34to, to try to say encompass all of this, but there are many different aspects, different kinds of
02:39films that I was inspired by. Cassavetes work within the scenes with the people who happen to be actors,
02:50but with the people, gave it a sense of authenticity and life that it felt like it was going to
02:57live
02:57off the screen. The screen couldn't inhabit it. It just couldn't hold it. But the Cassavetes thing was
03:03to explore that life and push it to the edge and still try to keep, if you're so inclined,
03:14a particular narrative and storyline and see if I can combine it all. It wasn't intentional that way,
03:20but that's what I felt.
03:27Because of the, uh, the extraordinary, uh, technology around us at this point, I mean,
03:32people talk about the, the fact that anyone can make a film. It's true. Anyone can express
03:38themselves with visual images, but what's happening, um, one has to remember is that technology is a tool.
03:45Um, the same principles apply, which is, uh, your, your need to tell that story, your need to go
03:52through the process. And you happen to be using, uh, uh, digital as opposed to film or, or, uh, an
03:59iPhone.
03:59I have no idea. But the key thing is that the technology does not dictate the art.
04:06The art dictates the technology. The art comes first and you use the technology for the art,
04:12whatever that art may be, you know, and I think there's a misconception today that,
04:17uh, because of the equipment, um, the equipment does it easily done. You can press a button and
04:22you have different sorts of, uh, uh, visual effects. Um, I learned this back with the Steadicam
04:28back during Raging Bull. I had designed fight sequences in the film, nine of them,
04:33and very, very specific ways. So much so that they were all drawn images. I have storyboards
04:38for everything and designs and outlines and diagrams of the choreography of the fights
04:43themselves. And myself and the cinematographer worked out the camera moves. That is the physical,
04:48actual use of the equipment at that time with no video assist, none of that sort of thing we have
04:53today. So for my, uh, director of photography, Chapman, it did take longer than we thought to
04:59create these images that you see in those fight scenes because of the nature of the equipment.
05:04And it, which means that it took, we had planned five weeks to shoot the fight scenes. It took 10.
05:10Um, there was one fight scene that I thought we would, um, do with this new instrument called the
05:17Steadicam. And we started shooting it. I did not design the shots. I just used the sense of the
05:25element that I thought the Steadicam would give me. Um, and after shooting for a day,
05:30I realized there was no way of getting around the design. In other words, the technology of this
05:36beautiful instrument was not going to direct the film for me. You know, something else was happening.
05:43And I scrapped it all and reshot it. And of course, used the Steadicam for the long takes,
05:48um, that I, uh, that are in the film and then eventually, uh, uh, understood the, uh, nature of
05:55it, um, to the point where we were able to do that long take, for example, in Goodfellas,
05:59which goes into the Copacabana. Um, but I had relied on the, um, this new technology to create, um,
06:08to create, uh, a certain aspect of cinema, which I, which was still mysterious to me. And I realized at
06:14that point that I still had to be there, you know, it wasn't going to do it for me. Um,
06:20I wanted to see what that equipment gives me, but I still have to direct the equipment
06:24and know what the equipment is capable of and what I can use it for. So this is a very
06:29important point.
06:37The issue of technology carries over particularly into the post-production, too,
06:41in the editing itself of a film, um, or of a visual narrative, so to speak. Um, in, uh,
06:48the days when we first started, of course, it was a separate track and picture. Um, if one wanted to
06:54make a dissolve or see, uh, uh, call for a dissolve or call for any special effect, it had to
06:59do a temp,
07:00so to speak. It had to go to a lab. Uh, very often we didn't see these dissolves until the
07:04film was
07:05finished. Um, but in this case, what's happening now is that this, uh, it's kind of, uh, exciting
07:11because you can see these different elements, um, uh, uh, pretty much immediately, uh, with the
07:18computer editing. Many different, uh, effects can be seen and experienced right away, uh, so that you
07:23could, you could, uh, react immediately to it. Yet there is a drawback, and that is the immediate nature of
07:31it. Very often I found that once we made the switch from editing in 35 millimeter to, uh, computer,
07:39I found that, uh, discussing how to make a change in a scene, uh, what we were used to would
07:46take maybe
07:4625, 30 minutes or so. As they're working on that change, splicing film, uh, uh, cutting, uh, syncing up,
07:55or whatever they were doing, um, you'd think about it possibly, or at least if you weren't thinking
08:00about it, you were in the presence of the change in a sense, you were experiencing the travel in a
08:05way, uh, from one version to the other. Um, and at a certain point, when we started using the computer,
08:12I'd ask for a change, say, why don't we try this, why don't we try that, and within, um, two
08:16to three
08:17minutes it was done. And so I had to learn, um, to do without that process, a very valuable process
08:25of another way of filmmaking, of waiting, of waiting and absorbing what you're doing.
08:33This was something else, and it threw me for quite a while, because it was immediate, uh, and almost
08:39at a certain point, because one's able, one is able to do this with the technology, there may be too
08:43many
08:44choices, and what I began to understand is that one has to steel yourself against all these choices,
08:51somehow, and learn how to, uh, uh, how should I put it, um, tame them in a way, and that
08:58the only way
08:58to do that is to keep focused on what you want to say, you see. Um, and so, uh, the
09:03extraneous,
09:04cutting away the extraneous, sometimes it works for me, sometimes it doesn't, but it is a different,
09:10um, it's a different medium this way, in terms of cutting that quickly, um, and having everything at
09:15your fingertips at this point. Um, I always think it's interesting, because if you have everything
09:20at your fingertips, and at such rate of speed, then you really are committed to the essence of
09:28what you're doing, you know. There's no excuse to say, I've got to wait for this, or I've got to
09:32wait
09:32for that. You really have to know what you're doing, even more so.
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