The East is a montage. It is old and it is young, very green in summer, very white in winter, gregarious, withdrawn and at once both sophisticated and provincial.
I make plays. In the air, on the ground, one cut or a million cuts - I don't think it matters.
I'm not a fan of these very cutty, handheld-y kind of films or TV shows, where a cut is just every half second or every two seconds, where you're desensitized to it. To me, a cut should say something and be impactful.
The essence of cinema is editing.
Well, I'll be honest with you, sometimes you don't know you're playing a moment that's going to be in a montage. Sometimes it's a scene that didn't work out the way you hoped it would be and ends up in a montage.
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.
The film is made in the editing room.
The first really important book I read about filmmaking was The Film Technique by Pudovkin. This was some time before I had ever touched a movie camera and it opened my eyes to cutting and montage.
Richard Lester is a wonderful director, a great comedy director, of course.
A lot of these big movies are just a collection or a montage of big set pieces.
Peter used to say that an artist’s job is to make order out of chaos. You collect details, look for a pattern, and organize. You make sense out of senseless facts. You puzzle together bits of everything. You shuffle and reorganize. Collage. Montage. Assemble.
In movies, you just see somebody close their eyes, and you go on to the next scene.
'Up' was the best. The first 10 minutes of that movie made me weep. It was so well done... even if that montage was all I'd seen, just as a short film, that was great. That was my favorite thing of the year.
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.
Movies are an editor's medium.
All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read heard overheard. What else?
If direction is a look, montage is a heartbeat. To foresee is the characteristic of both; but what one seeks to foresee in space, the other seeks in time.
I really love sort of classical cinema where people were telling stories with very little dialogue, and people were using the camera in a really interesting way.
The medium of film is really wonderful because it can behave in the same way as collage and painting; it can be layered and non-literal.
I think part of that comes from time's passed, and she's been in an environment where training is part of the thing. It's not like we do a montage of her discovering her powers like in every X-Men film but yeah, there's no montage. But she does have these new abilities that we pick her up with.
We can see an anthill or a roach or a flower or anything, but we have this frame where our mind recognizes an anthill and then moves on, without taking the opportunity to have the sense of awe that we could have if we really looked at it. The montage is about taking pieces of reality and rearranging them - creating new frames to make you have to stop and look at things in a fresh way. It's basically taking pieces of everyday reality and rearranging them to show people the magic that is inherent in all of these things already.
I never cared about making one coherent masterpiece with a conventional narrative. I always wanted my movies to have images falling from all directions in a vaudevillian way. If you didn't like what was happening in one scene, you could just snooze through it until the next scene.
