THEY CALL THE SHOTS
Danny Boyle, Tom McCarthy, Quentin Tarantino, Ridley Scott, Tom Hooper and Todd Haynes talk about being true to history and true to themselves.
Filmmaking is a collaborative art. Yet most movie directors work alone in the sense that there is only one of them. So when a group of directors get together to talk about how they do what they do, it is with a genuine interest and curiosity in how others might approach the same problems and situations. The Envelope gathered six such filmmakers whose work this season crossed centuries, continents and outer space — Danny Boyle, director of the Apple founder story “Steve Jobs”; Todd Haynes, director of the period love story “Carol”; Tom Hooper for the historical drama “The Danish Girl”; Tom McCarthy for the church investigation film “Spotlight”; Ridley Scott of the adventure “The Martian”; and Quentin Tarantino, director of the post-Civil War “The Hateful Eight.”
Here are edited excerpts from their conversation moderated by Times film writers Rebecca Keegan and Mark Olsen in which these six directors engage one another on the importance of factual and his-
torical accuracy, working with editors, getting the most from actors and how they might approach getting started today.
Mark Olsen: Tom, on your film “Spotlight” there’s a real attention to detail and to the reality of the story you’re telling of a group of reporters working at the Boston Globe. Why was that something that was important you?
Tom McCarthy: I think early on we had this sort of commitment to craft, to process, and we spent so much time with these reporters and then detailing every element, some of them really interesting, some of them wildly tedious — we kind of geeked out on it a little bit. And we found all these little elements, whether it was going down to the library and going through the old clips or finding old journals and spending two weeks poring over them, we just found it really interesting and compelling. That was kind of an early decision that we gambled would be compelling to audiences and maybe possibly be very boring if we didn’t do it right.
Rebecca Keegan: Ridley, did you take a similar approach to science in “The Martian”? How much did you worry about really being accurate?
Ridley Scott: I didn’t worry at all. I do as little research as possible and I trust the writer and I trust the book. And both the book and writer were excellent, so I said to [screenwriter Drew Goddard], “Is this all accurate?” He said, “It is.” I said, “Thank God for that.” And so we just got on with it. But, I mean, if I didn’t understand anything, I’m like a child with a pencil. I draw. And I draw the right way through the movie. So anything that was scientific that would be boring to speak about I figured had to be illustrated.
Olsen: Danny, your film, “Steve Jobs,” is based on true events but is a purposely fictionalized telling of those events. Why tell the story that way?
Danny Boyle: We always used to say none of this happened but it’s all true. It’s a kind of interpretation by a dramatist, Aaron Sorkin, and the rest of us, of
Olsen: “The Danish Girl” is based on a true story; it takes place in a very specific time, a very specific place. So how much of that attention to period accuracy was a concern?
an extraordinary character. Obviously, the same six people don’t turn up 40 minutes before each of the launches over three different years, you know? That’s not going to happen. But you want that to happen in a drama.
Tom Hooper: I think it was an interesting contradiction because on the one hand the film is surprisingly topical at the moment. And yet a lot of the dramatic tension revolves around really understanding the time frame you’re in because, this was the 1920s where the word “transgender” didn’t exist, where the medical establishment consistently pathologized anyone having that sort of sense of gender identity and would threaten them with locking them up or lobotomizing them or irradiating them. So it felt like really understanding how extraordinary it was for Lili to emerge and transition at that time made the story much more dramatic.
Keegan: Todd, did you face something similar on “Carol” in that this is based on a Patricia Highsmith novel written in the ’50s? Did you have a similar sense of creating the stakes for a contemporary audience?
Todd Haynes: It’s all in that book, her experience, her kind of acute tracking of the experience of falling in love through the eyes of the younger character in “Carol” played by Rooney Mara, the character Therese. So that gave us the sort of foundation. And I just felt like I didn’t need to keep thinking about how its relevance has to be proven or demonstrated to a contemporary audience if you just are true to the characters and true to the situations.
Keegan: Danny, do you have a strategy for giving a note to an actor?
Boyle: Without it being rebuffed? No. On “Jobs” we used a lot of rehearsal time — we actually interrupted the filming to rehearse in blocks. I think what you’re looking for is — rather than what outsiders think we do, which is like a hugely penetrative note comes in at a certain moment which just reveals everything to
everybody, it doesn’t really work like that. You’re looking more for a kind of osmosis transferring your feeling for the film and the concept of the film, the idea of what you’re doing. But you’re also looking to illustrate the best way to suit that, what they have come up with. You know, because then the note feels like it’s organic to them.
Hooper: Eddie Redmayne tells a story that — he said I have something called “the walk.” I said, “What do you mean by ‘the walk’?” And he goes, “Well, basically when you walk from the camera or the monitor to me I can judge by the speed of your walk how many notes you have. If you walk fast it means you’ve got one thing to say. It’s going to be simple. If you walk very slowly, you’re doing an edit of how many of the notes that you actually have that you’re going to give me. So you’re selecting the three from the eight or the three from the six.” And so he’s always in fear of the slow walk because he knows that means I’ve got a lot to say.
McCarthy: [Michael] Keaton used to do this thing to me where you’d be in the middle of a take and I’d just be watching, and I usually let the take run out anyway, but if he didn’t feel good he’d suddenly look right into the camera and go like that [holds up a finger]. And it always freaked me out because you’re so in your world, you’re back by your little camera alone, no one around me. And finally I said, “Why do you keep doing that?” He’s like, “I don’t want you to stop and call cut.” I’m like, “I’m never going to call cut but you keep freaking me out.” It was like the reverse of freaking an actor out.
Tarantino: Especially an acting scene, I want a perfect take before I move on, one take from beginning to end that I could actually use, just plug into the movie…
Haynes: But do you mean from the acting or from the camera?
Tarantino: No, from the acting. I want one take from beginning to end that I feel is fairly perfect. And then I want one more that’s, like, a little less perfect.
McCarthy: I feel that too, yeah. Scott: You don’t take a sneaky look at the lighting and the camera and things like that? I do.
Haynes: I look at the camera, but I also find that actors have different speeds — where some of them, it’s that first take and then others it takes a little time. And so I can’t ever expect that to happen all in
‘Especially an acting scene, I want a perfect take before I move on, one take from beginning to end.’
— QUENTIN TARANTINO, right, with Danny Boyle, left, and Tom McCarthy
that one take.
Tarantino: Not that it makes me different from other people, but I am coming from I’ve written the material, and not that I have it necessarily exactly in my head the way I need to hear it, but I do want it, like, on a stage, uninterrupted, boom.
McCarthy: But as a writer how good are you — because this is something I struggle with as a writer too — about letting go? Like them interpreting, even on-word. So word-perfect but interpreting a scene where you’re, like, that is very different than I initially saw it. Can you let go of that?
Haynes: I find letting go is what you do; you have to learn how to let go at every stage. Even when it’s your own script, you have to surrender at a certain point to what you get on film and then you surrender from those dailies to what that first cut looks like. And you have to surrender that first cut to what people are starting to say about the cut.
Scott: No, no, no. Not me. I cut as I go. Do you cut as you go?
Tarantino: No, not at all. Haynes: No, I don’t cut as I go either. I can’t.
Scott: I cut as I go. I go see rushes and then go and see the scene that was done that day.
Haynes: That’s amazing you can do that.
Tarantino: The assembly, that’s literally a moment for my editor to get as familiar with the footage as I am. But it doesn’t start until I walk in the room.
Haynes: Because each thing is like a separate phase. And I want to kind of let the other phase go away and then be completely present for the next one.
Tarantino: Well, I never get into the room and say, “OK, now show me your version of the movie.” What I do though is, like, starting with Scene 1 and working all the way to the end. But even more than that, what I need to do is — I have all the takes for a given scene on DVD, and the night before I need to watch all those takes and make all my notes. And I don’t have the script supervisor’s book there because I don’t want to know what scenes were circled or which ones that I liked
more [during shooting]. I want to — that was then, this is now.
Haynes: Smart. Keegan: Was there a movie that you walked out of and you said, “I want to do that for a living”?
Haynes: I grew up in L.A., and I was around movies and people who made movies, but it was still going to see my first film as a child, “Mary Poppins,” that just completely had this, you know, exorcistic-like effect on me. But I remember having a fantasy as a kid that one day if I could only walk into a store and ask to see any movie in the world and they would hand it to you over the counter, and I was like that would be my dream. And then, you know, 20 years later you’re standing in the video store and you’re looking at all the choices.
McCarthy: And Quentin is behind the counter.
Haynes: But all of the sudden, the fact that they’re all available changes your desire and you feel a kind of weird, like, ugh, I want to pick something but I don’t know what I want to pick. But because it’s all there, you know. I wonder what it does to that drive.
Tarantino: I’m of a double-edged sword on that. I mean, I think one of the reasons that there haven’t been one minority filmmaker after another after another after another in the history of America is, one, because of institutional racism, but it is also because of what you’re talking about. You have to convince a whole lot of people to back you, and that has to be a thing that you believe can actually happen to invest 20 years [thinking it can happen] before it ever happens. The other edge of that sword is the weeding out process of how much do you want it? Are you going to base your entire life for the next 20 years on the chance that might happen? And, you know, you could’ve had the same passion that we all have and just not be able to marshal the troops in order to do the job, but that 20 years of pushing that rock up the hill and not knowing can you ever get there, that is part of it.
Scott: But there’s no excuse today because kids have access to making film — not film, you know — on an iPhone. You can get a camera. If you want to make a film, go make a movie and stop whining.
Hooper: Like “Tangerine,” which was shot on an iPhone.
Scott: “I’ll pay for the hamburgers; we’re going to meet on the pier Saturday morning. You’re going to be Fred. I’m going to be Bill. I’m going to kill you. We’re going to make a movie.” That’s it. And there’s no excuse not to make it.
‘There’s no excuse today because kids have access to making film ... on an iPhone.... If you want to make a film, go make a movie and stop whining.’
— RIDLEY SCOTT, center, with Todd Haynes, left, and Tom Hooper