Television is a prisoner of dialogue and steady-cam. People walk down a hall, and the camera follows them around a corner.
Woody Allen likes to do a lot of master shots. He likes to get the whole thing in one take, and so you could be going along doing a scene, and then the next to last line, all of a sudden, you stumble, and you have to go back to first base.
Continuity isn't actually something that I ever worry about. You use it where you need to, and you don't use it where you don't need to.
The key to making good movies is to pay attention to the transition between scenes.
It's not like some movies where you're following a bunch of different stories you can cut around. There was nowhere to cut to. It's these guys. We're not cutting back to anybody else.
Writing, of course, is writing, acting comes from the theater, and cinematography comes from photography. Editing is unique to film. You can see something from different points of view almost simultaneously, and it creates a new experience.
You can have a movie with hardly any cuts, or very few cuts, that is fascinating, you can't take your eyes away from it... Look at some of the long takes in Citizen Kane.
I like to shoot scenes where I can see the beginning, middle and end of the entire scene. But, when you edit a movie together, you can just cut right into the middle. You don't need to see them walk into the room and put their jacket on the chair. There's always a lot of shoe leather that you can remove.
In 'Saving Mr. Banks,' the challenge was just transitions. Time transitions from 1961 to 1906; how do you follow a character in one environment to another? And sometimes these transitions were quick, so how do you do that?
The sound is the key; audiences will accept visual discontinuity much more easily than they'll accept jumps in the sound. If the track makes sense, you can do almost anything visually.
As we watch TV or films, there are no organic transitions, only edits. The idea of A becoming B, rather than A jumping to B, has become foreign.
Tracking action without cutting is the least jarring method of placing the audience into a real-time experience where they are the ones making the subtle choices of where and when to look.
Try to place the camera somewhere where you get most of the information from there, so you don't need to have too many shots and be too explanatory and expositional about the scene.
In certain fight scenes in 'Raging Bull' - for example, the shorter ones - I literally just took the head and tail of the shot and put it together, and it all worked beautifully.
Whenever I see a cut of a film and something is gone, I don't notice it unless it obviously should have been kept.
Eisenstein was a good editor. I was trained as a film editor, and I've no doubt that the editor is key to a film.
On 'Y Tu Mama Tambien,' we started exploring shots that are longer, where the camera is moving around the actors, and there are no cuts, and you feel like you're there.
For a film, when you condense, you don't want to keep going back to the same setting over and over.
The more nearly the film cutter approaches the natural law of interest, the more invisible will be his cutting. If the camera moves from one person to another at the exact moment that you in the legitimate theatre would have turned your head, you will not be conscious of a cut.
There is no acting in a serial. You simply race through the reels.
The reason I like tracking shots has to do more with a sense of real time than anything else. In 'Gravity,' the use of tracking - of long extended takes - was partially because we wanted to film it like an IMAX-style Discovery Channel documentary. You don't have the luxury of cuts when you're in space. The camera is there; you're just observing.
There's some projects you're - where you're worrying that the continuity isn't right because people aren't watching after your hair or wardrobe or props, or you're not sure you're getting shot at the right angle.
There's no continuity in videos... you can jump around all over the place. In features, you can't throw in a close-up of a musician stomping on a guitar - you have to film a scene.
I don't have continuity people. I don't have clapper boards. I don't have monitors. I shoot very fast, I shoot a lot, and we just keep on going.
