Justin Hayward

A lot, and I smoked them all despite your BS ;) :lol:

I think today's Sundance programmers would drop kick a "Clerks" submission out of the festival.

Again, I'll take this as a compliment. Thanks Phil :lol:

I submitted cold. Paid the fee. Sent the film in the mail. Didn't know anybody. Didn't talk to anybody. But that was a long time ago, I guess.

Very nice. Looks great.

I'll take that as a compliment. ;)

Side note, Phil... You blasted my first question on this website about short film I wanted to make that eventually went to Sundance and kickstarted my director career, so... :P

See...

Me too :) I try not to be discouraging, but I do warn people that want to get into this that they should know what job in filmmaking they want to retire doing and should want it so bad they can't imagine doing anything else. Because it's back breaking work with long hours where you leave your house in the dark and get home in the dark and loads of uncertainty as to whether you can pay your bills month to month. It's very unusual work. My brother wanted to follow me into film, but I knew he didn't have the passion I did and I encouraged him to keep his UPS job loading trucks. Now he's a driver making great money, working normal hours, getting good exercise, great benefits, 36 holes on Saturdays, just bought a house, and has no interest in making movies.

All I can say is, I wanna see it.

Congrats Matthew! It's so true what you said about the learning process. I made a micro-budget feature almost ten years ago now and I often tell people that I learned more shooting that movie than I did in my entire film school and post film school career combined.

I mean, that's it, Tyler. You seem like a nice guy, but you imply your technical knowledge and your refined taste exceeds anyone on this forum that disagrees with you. It just rubs people wrong... I think.

Me either. I just made more in less than two months than what I normally make in a year by only directing a couple commercials, and I live in Chicago.

Janusz Kaminski screamed, "an hour!" before Spielberg was finished describing the shot. The best thing about this thread is I was reminded of the behind the scenes of "War of the Worlds" which I recently bought on blu ray. I've watched it all day today, and with screaming kids in the background :) The set design and FX are amazing, but it's so much fun to watch the lighting and production design and how one of the masters of blocking, blocks.

In an interview with Jon Favreau he talks about the first acts of his screenplays always tend to be a little fat, because that's where he gets to explore the characters, then that's where the studio makes him cut everything. Edward Burns says one of his biggest problems with his own writing is repetitiveness. He says he's constantly self editing his scripts as he writes to make sure he's not repeating himself. The cheapest place to fix a movie is on paper :)

You got me

Hyperbole?

When you say, "lets face it", you imply, "lets face facts". Not, "lets face my opinions".

No hyperbole there. Tyler, sometimes it seriously seems like your trolling.

Sounds like they work in advertising. Here's a tip... reference famous movies when describing a look. "Ya know, like that scene in Taxi Driver..."

It just comes off as arguing as fact that, under the same circumstances, the difference between film and digital is the difference between a Ferrari and a Buick. Then when someone questions that, you imply they're wrong because their taste isn't as refined as yours. There's a difference between saying, "I'm not a fan of your favorite movie" and saying, "Your favorite movie sucks".

I think I first heard the joke from David Mullen that the only entry level jobs on a film set are P.A. and director. Of which I've been both. People can certainly argue that crew people have worked on more shows, but if they've never been in the hot seat, they have no idea what it's like to be under the scrutiny a director has to deal with. Like Richard said, we have to take all the blame for everyone's job. That's what our job is, overseeing everyone else's job to the best of our ability. I've been on both sides of the coin and I promise you a director's job is a hundred times more stressful than than a paid crew guy that has one specific job to accomplish on that day, then moves on to something else tomorrow. Nothing against them at all. I need them. But they have one thing to do, and I have a thousand. It's harder than you think.

I really love that book. Now I have to re-read it since you brought it up.

I was more referring to incompetence that leads to unnecessary work or worse, overtime. If I wasn't there to stop him, he likely would have made them relight for more stop, which would have been a total waste of time and we were already behind schedule. But I understand a DP going over the director to the producer probably won't look good under any circumstance. And yes, Richard, I've taken a lot of blame and it sucks.

While I agree with this in general, I have seen directors make it really difficult to take their word for it. A few years ago, for political reasons, I co-directed a table top commercial with a guy that didn't know anything technical. That was fine until he brought one of the agency creatives over to me, the DP, and the 1st AC and asked if we could shoot several pairs of shoes sitting on a rotator at 48fps. I told him we couldn't, because we were at a T8 and if we went to a 5.6 we wouldn't hold focus from front to back when the shoes rotated lengthwise. And I didn't want to get into relighting for more stop unless there was good reason. I said if he wants the rotation to move slower I can just slow the rotator by half. He said he would rather shoot 48fps. I asked why. He said because "more frames are better." I explained that nothing on the rotator is moving so we can just slow the rotator down by half and you'll get "more frames". "So you're telling me I can't shoot 48fps?" "That's what I'm telling you." He rolled his eyes and left. We tried to figure out why on earth he thinks "more frames are better" when it's totally unrelated to slow motion. Then it occurred to me that the first Hobbit movie just came out and he likely read about HFR, but didn't understand how it worked. I later found out on another job he shot clothes hanging on racks at 96fps. After something like that happens it makes "cause I'm the director" a little hard to swallow. Good thing, in that case, I was also the director :)