Essay Words and Movies by Stanley Kubrick (Sight & Sound, vol.30 (1960/61), p.14.) via visual-memory.co.uk
“The perfect novel from which to make a movie is, I think, not the novel of action but, on the contrary, the novel which is mainly concerned with the inner life of its characters. It will give the adaptor an absolute compass bearing, as it were, on what a character is thinking or feeling at any given moment of the story. And from this he can invent action which will be an objective correlative of the book’s psychological content, will accurately dramatise this in an implicit, off-the-nose way without resorting to having the actors deliver literal statements of meaning.”
“I think that for a movie or a play to say anything really truthful about life, it has to do so very obliquely, so as to avoid all pat conclusions and neatly tied-up ideas”
The ideas have to be discovered by the audience, and their thrill in making the discovery makes those ideas all the more powerful. You use the audience’s thrill of surprise and discovery to reinforce your ideas, rather than reinforce them artificially through plot points or phoney drama or phoney stage dynamics put in to power them across.”
“Style is what an artist uses to fascinate the beholder in order to convey to him his feelings and emotions and thoughts. These are what have to be dramatised, not the style.”
“Often, at one point, the writer expects a silent look to get across what it would take a rebus puzzle to explain, and in the next moment the actor is given a long speech to convey something that is quite apparent in the situation and for which a brief look would be sufficient. Writers tend to approach the creation of drama too much in terms of words, failing to realise that the greatest force they have is the mood and feeling they can produce in the audience through the actor. They tend to see the actor grudgingly, as someone likely to ruin what they have written, rather than seeing that the actor is in every sense their medium.”
“a writer-director is really the perfect dramatic instrument; and the few examples we have where these two peculiar techniques have been properly mastered by one man have, I believe, produced the most consistently fine work.”
“Any art form properly practised involves a to and fro between conception and execution, the original intention being constantly modified as one tries to give it objective realisation. In painting a picture this goes on between the artist and his canvas; in making a movie it goes on between people.”
“The very reason he started out directing music videos and commercials was because there was no screen credit, just a convenient opportunity to learn the craft, and get paid for it. p. 204
“Doesn’t want to be made aware of expectations towards his work.” p. 204
“shouldn’t your movies, if they are truly personal, change the way you change?” p. 205
“I would like my brand to stand for ‘works really hard,’ ‘tries to make it as good as he possibly can.'” p. 205
Fincher will wait for Michael Brennan to be available as dolly grip on his films.
Michael Brennan’s work with Fincher:
Zodiac, Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Fight Club, Se7en.
“The directors of the future are going to come from YouTube.” p. 207
Fincher: “I actually believe that anybody, who thinks that their dailies look amazing doesn’t understand what cinema is capable of.” p. 209
“But your point of view is all you’ve got.” p. 210
Fincher quoting Scorsese “The things you do badly are as much part of your style as the things you do well.” p. 210
“I don’t think you cannot have a perspective.” p. 211
“for David Fincher directing is more than drawing neat little pictures and showing them to the camera man… Directing means total control over everything the audience sees and hears for two hours; forging their experience of the story.” p. 211
Fincher: Staging… It’s the most important thing directors do,” p. 211
Fincher: “Creativity happens on the fringe… Start in the fringe, meet those people, write your scripts. I always wanted to give a lecture at filmschools. You go in and you see all these fresh faces, and you say: ‘You! Stand up, tell me your story. Tell me what your film is going to be about.’ And they start, and you go: ‘Shut up and sit the fuck down!’ And if they do, you go: ‘You’re not ready.’ the film business is filled with shut-up and sit-the-fuck-down. You got to be able to tell your story in spite of sit-down and shut-the-fuck-up.” p. 212
“essential Fincher: Trust yourself, trust your perspective on your story.” p. 212
to clients he will say “This is what I know how to do, this is what I want to do with this. And if you don’t want to do it, don’t hire me.” p. 212
Fincher: “I don’t like short-hand, and I don’t like to be told who’s evil. I don’t want to know who the villain is, I don’t want to know who the hero is.” p. 212
“To succeed, a film must treat the audience member as an audience member, not as a commissar of culture.” location 698
“The commissar gets her thrill not from the film but from the power to admonish.” location 699
real filmmakers “Will they fail? Certainly. Both artistically and commercially. But (a) they have no other choice and (b) realizing that their final choices must be essentially subjective, they may learn to trust their instincts. Also (c) they’ll have more fun.” location 702
“Like any human endeavor, like you and me, they have inevitably been exposed to and have, in the main, submitted to the power of self-corruption, of self-righteousness, to the abuse of power. But like General della Rovere, like you and me, like the studio executives, they possess the possibility of beauty and, hence, for human transformation: not as preaching, not as instruction, not as doctrine—all of which, finally, are out of place in the cinema and can awaken, at best, but self-righteousness.” location 740
“The garbage of exposition, backstory, narrative, and characterization spot-welds the reader into interest in what is happening now. It literally stops the show.” location 866
***”When the film turns narrative rather than dramatic, when it stands in for the viewer’s imagination, the viewer’s interest is lost.” location 1040
***”The writer may choose to supply stock, genre, or predictable answers to the magic questions, and the drama will be predictable and boring. The writer will have saved himself the agony of indecision, self-doubt—of work, in short—and so, of course, will the protagonist.” location 1230
“The gags, here, happen to be identical to Aristotle’s “incidents,” that is, those occurrences without which the plot cannot move forward.” location 1391
“Shoot an entrance and an exit. It’s free.” location 1627
***”Our ability to conceptualize about both the process and the product is accompanied, and inspired, by the pure animal joy of submersion in a mystery.” location 1653
“Wisdom, therefore, lies not in the phenomonological question “What does a duck look like?” but, rather, in the practical “What is a duck looking for?”” location 1658
******”one may learn to prevail through understanding rather than strength—the basic tenet of jujitsu” location 1668
“Well, the poor man, unhampered by the capacity to waste, was forced to employ thought, and he wondered: What does a duck like? How does a duck see?” location 1678
“We have all had the experience of saying of a statue, “How lifelike,” and, of a life mask, cast from the human form and painted to perfection, “How lifeless.”” location 1679
“For the actual human being and the actual duck were created by, and so contain, a mystery. They cannot be reduced to mere measurements, and all attempts to do so (whether through the caliper of the decoy maker or through the audience testing of the social scientist) result in lifeless parody.” location 1681
“For another name for “chance” is “mystery,” and another name is “art.”” location 1685
“Jewish rabbinical tradition notes that adultery is like murder, for it is a crime that cannot be undone. Violation of the aesthetic distance is a rupture of the artist’s compact with the audience, and, similarly, its rupture cannot be mended.” location 1790
***”the difference between enjoyment and stimulation. One leaves the ballet feeling refreshed, as a promise has been fulfilled. One quits the video-game or pornographic film feeling empty and vaguely debauched—for one has only been stimulated. The brain, here, craves a repetition of the stimulation, as with any drug.” location 1833
“One may sit in front of the television for five hours, but after King Lear one goes home.” location 1835
*****”violence—their belligerence masks their fear and displays their ignorant belief that battles are somehow won by intimidation.” location 1894
“Violent encounters are won only by those putting themselves at risk of violence.” location 1895
“Aristotle cautions that it is insufficient for the hero to get the idea. Many modern moviemakers, however, act as if they hadn’t read his book. Their films depict the gentle progress of the protagonist toward self-actualization—usually depicted as a slow, arms-extended twirling on a beach (as if the expression of a racial memory of our descent from the shipworm). location 2040
“These men, and their performances, are characterized by the absence of the desire to please.” location 2055
“On screen, they don’t have anything to prove, and so we are extraordinarily drawn to them. They are not “sensitive”; they are not antiheroes; they are, to use a historic term, “he-men.” location 2056
“But consensus is, of course, the dead opposite of that subjectivity that is the essence of the theatrical experience.” location 2385
*******”And so, now firmly self-understood as part of a jury, he utters the phrase that is the foundation of society and the death of art: “What do you think?” Consensus, enshrined as right thinking, ensues, and the stage is set for mediocrity.” location 2400
“productive subjectivity” location 2441
“They are lost in the wilderness and prefer, as might you or I, a broken compass to no compass at all.” location 2449
“They who lack talent expect things to happen without effort.” location 2546
Dramatic construction with index cards. Each card = one minute of screen time, one script page.
“writing on each of them a minimal number of words that describe a step in the narrative… Important character interactions in a scene.” (Mackendrick p. 45)
what each main character in the scene wants. scene objective. how the story moves forward.
