To shoot a conventional film means that you are always covering yourself. You are putting nets and, in a way, letting bad decisions take over.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When you're making a film all by yourself, that requires you to have quite a bit of a point of view in order for anything to get done.
When you are shooting in a conventional way, you put nets around yourself. It's very hard to fall and hit the ground. You can always manipulate things to make it not embarrassing. If the scene is a little bit bad, you can polish it or even take it out. You can hide your mistakes.
On a film, you do your own work, you come together and meet on set, and then you shoot. It's great.
But, in each case, as a filmmaker who's been given sizable budgets with which to work, I feel a responsibility to the audience to be shooting with the absolute highest quality technology that I can and make the film in a way that I want.
When you go into a film, you read it, and something clicks for you, and you like it, and you sign on for it; you go for it. You know that this is going to be a good film, and that is your best hope. Past that, it's a crap shoot - you roll the dice.
If you are going to do a film properly you have to give yourself completely to it.
As a filmmaker, you put the film out there, and you just want it to be okay. You don't want to let people down; you don't want to embarrass yourself.
You never have any idea where your movie's going to go when you're shooting - you're in this little bubble. Everything you care about is getting the next step right: getting the script right, finding the right actors, shooting it. Then you spend half a year in a dark room editing your film, and you don't talk to anybody.
The most honest form of filmmaking is to make a film for yourself.
When I am shooting a film I never think of how I want to shoot something; I simply shoot it.