Learning From the Pros

Well I am forced to delay the movie review one more day owing to some production-based dilemmas that needed to be solved and my television being occupied, to my utter disgust, with sex and the city.

But I thought I might give away a trade secret... where I'm learning a lot of the filmmaking stuff I use. I learn it from the people I admire. While part of that is ALWAYS inclusive of watching their films, I am actually referring to a distinct advantage in our digital world of websites like youtube where the artists and craftspeople you admire are only a click away.

I can't tell you how many interviews I've since ripped from youtube and kept on hard drives, well over a few hundred gigabytes. From Spielberg to Tarantino, there's plenty of material with some really interesting and useful knowledge imparted to those who go searching.

This is especially evident with every Oscar season when all the "great" directors (except Terrence Malick) will come out to talk a bit about their work and craft.  I stumbled upon this goldmine of information the net has to offer during the 2009/2010 Oscar campaign when nominees included AVATAR, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS and THE HURT LOCKER, and I was merely searching for Tarantino-related videos to satisfy my hunger for every word that man speaks and I came across the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF) Directors on directing panel... Basically they put all the talked about directors of the season at a table with each other and have them talk and discuss films for over an hour.
This particular panel had Quentin Tarantino, Kathryn Bigelow, James Cameron, Lee Daniels, Pete Doctor and Todd Philips... it's awe inspiring to say the least.




My only caveat for this video treasure trove is to avoid interviews (aside from some brilliant Hitchcock clips floating about by the AFI) that are shorter than 5 Minutes, usually most of that is a moronic interviewer asking stupid questions ("if you could have any superpower...", when it's a superhero film for a painful example) that add nothing to the conversation, and in my personal experience, the best ones are the interviews and panels that last long enough for the filmmakers to say something truly valuable. So my suggestion is to first search videos longer than 20 min as youtube allows in their advanced search to weed out the less insightful clips.

Hopefully I will be back tomorrow with a short review and the beginning of my "Movie-a-day" feature. I can say, however, that the first on the pile is an Australian film called BLURRED.