The movie I worked on that had the most problems and interference came from the smallest indie movie I've ever done. I couldn't believe what the director had to go through; he was destroyed.
Universal rushed us. We started shooting without a script that was totally completed.
To be honest, everyone thinks that a digital camera is more reliable and every single time I work on any movie, it's just as many problems, the memory card doesn't work or blah blah blah, it overheats; it's the same volume as another camera. I think people are bit taken in by it.
When I made 'Eight Below,' they wanted me to shoot digital, and I didn't want to do it because that's just what I need, to get a great series of takes and then find out the camera was frozen.
My second film 'Johnny Gaddar' got delayed because of financial reasons. The film was taken over by another production house and in the process we lost a year.
Sometimes the odds are against you-the director doesn't know what the hell he's doing, or something falls apart in the production, or you're working with an actor who's just unbearable.
Well, in terms of the filming with the car, you always wanted to be on the side which the cameras weren't, because - and it sounds ridiculous, but getting in and out of that car, all in leather, in the heat, was a problem.
In film, there's so many little things where not just the actor can blow his lines, but technically, it doesn't quite come off in the perfect way envisioned.
I had a scene where the chair was meant to slide off the table, but do you think it would slide off? No. We were running out of time and we had to get these scenes done urgently.
Look, I've done some low-budget movies and I've done some big-budget movies, and the big-budget movies were always kind of disorganized.
Whenever a film has three different release dates, people understandably assume that there must be something wrong with it.
At that point, the movie was called Wild Force. Everything fell apart, eventually - our financing completely fell apart - and we were never able to make that film.
They didn't have the money to keep Christopher Lee long enough to play his scenes with me.
Telltale signs that your movie is going to go bad is, one, the producer of the movie flees the country.
The best-case scenario is everything goes perfect and smooth, but we're also a new and weird show. So all my conversations were, "Hey last night didn't go perfect but we kind of know what we've got in store for everybody episode-wise."
I liked working with Tom Christopher as he was great as Hawk, and Wilfred Hyde White but I wished it were in a different context as the changes really tuned off the audience.
The funniest thing is that all the things every director goes through, I thought I could shortcut, but there was no getting around those issues.
You hear about actors being late and all that sort of stuff, but you never find that with an actor who's directed, because an actor who's directed understands all the problems your production is going through.
With 'Agent Vinod', there was a lot of chaos with schedules and the film took a year and a half to shoot.
The thing is, it really did take us too long to get these recordings done. We've had our rough times in the studio in the past, but after four weeks most of the material would have been recorded. This time it seemed like it just goes on and on.
Most of the albums that have taken long have been related to illness and fatigue or producer problems.
For a two-hour movie on a 20-day shooting schedule, it's O.K. to have an actor who's a pain in the neck.
_0_thumbnail_47x47.jpg "Frank Marshall at the Deauville American Film Festival"){kind=small}
