How do you reign in the character’s eccentricity ? Well, I had to be prepared to let people dislike her at times because she’s a bit of a bitch, but at the same time, she’s gorgeous and she’s funny and she’s silly and you sort of feel for her. You kind of sense her confusion about who she is and her life. She’s very, very vulnerable, I think, underneath all of that stuff. I just had to work very, very hard. Sometimes I would say to Michel, “Let me know if I’m not going enough. Let me know if I’m going too far.” And more often than not, he would be pushing me further. I was so terrified of being over the top and he would just say, “No, no, no. More, more, more.” And I’d be like, “Really ?” He’d go, “Yeah, it doesn’t matter. Just do it, just try it.” That was fantastically liberating. When you do classical period films, you don’t get the opportunity to do that. It’s a more subtle approach.
Tell us a joke.
Your life has meaning.Tell us a secret.
Your life has meaning.
Tiscali: It’s worth noting that many of the cast come from famous or dysfunctional families, a bit like the Tenenbaums.
Wes Anderson: It’s interesting. You know, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, certainly Anjelica Huston, all those families are real achievers, you know, and fame is an issue for their whole families. For Anjelica Huston (daughter of John Huston) I think there’s definitely things for her to relate to in terms of the character that Hackman is playing. Hackman - I didn’t know much of anything about his background, but after we’d finished the movie I saw an episode of Inside The Actors Studio which he did while we were filming. And he talked about his father, and it seemed to really relate to what he’d been playing in the movie - it caught me so much off-guard. You know, there was no dialogue between us about it, but it was clearly something he couldn’t have helped but to tap into.Tiscali: What did he say in the programme?
Wes Anderson: His father left his family when he was 13 or so, and he just described this moment when Hackman and his friends were playing in the street, and his father drove by. And Hackman saw him driving by, and his father kind of waved from the window but didn’t stop the car. And it was the last he saw him for ten years. And Hackman had really choked up when he was telling it. It was very moving. I’d never heard anything about this at all. And he’d been playing this father who abandons his family for years and years. (via)
23:47
Jurassic Park kitchen scene.
DEAN CUNDEY (DP): That was actually one of the most complex and thoughtful sequences, and it’s always been one of my favourites in the film. Partly because when we walked into the set as it was being built, and I looked and saw that everywhere there was steel. But also it’s brushed stainless steel, which is particularly difficult because it reflects light and things in all directions. So we were constantly devising ways to hide the things that shouldn’t be seen, like lights and so forth, and yet create surfaces that the animators and compositors could put reflections in so that the illusion of reality was followed through with.
Would you say that was the most taxing bit of the film?
DEAN CUNDEY (DP): I think it probably was, because we were combining puppetry with visual effects, creatures…and again, doing Jurassic Park, nobody had photorealistic creatures in the computer before, so none of us knew anything about what they were going to look like when they were in, composited, any of the techniques we were just inventing them as we went along. Every shot required a great deal of thought. I think that a lot of the credit goes to the fact that Steven [Spielberg] was willing to find ways to accommodate all of the unknown, and as I would think of a potential difficulty on a particular shot and explain it to him, he would say, “Oh, okay, well how do we fix it?” and he was willing to listen to it rather than dismissing it and saying “Don’t worry about it”, and finding out later that it was less rewarding than you had hoped. (via)
I was in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the first stop, and I was in this sad hotel going, “I’ve got to start writing this.” I took a walk, and saw as I was walking around—it was pretty desolate—this group of surly-looking high-school girls walking and smoking. I was watching, and there was this one girl in the pack. I remember she looked back—she didn’t look at me, but she kind of looked away. I just saw her face, and she looked like this sweet poser that was with the group. I remember going, “Wow, that.” Because I had never had a sister. I was an only child. So I knew I wanted to write about myself and my nerdy friends, but I knew I needed to represent the freak group. So when I saw her, I was like, “Oh, I like that character. I like the idea of this girl who looks like she’s trying to fit in that way.” That’s where Lindsay came from.
AV Club | Paul Feig walks us through Freaks And Geeks (Part 1 of 5)
The biggest difference I have found when working photochemically versus digitally on motion pictures is the length of time the takes can last. Broadly, a 1,000ft roll of 35mm film lasts around nine-and-a-half minutes before running out, while a digital tape or recording card or hard drive can last from 40 minutes to over an hour and a half. This translates to a very different rhythm on the floor; the pressure to “cut” to save film is alleviated.
Archiving digital images is a technological dilemma. The idea of that discovered shoebox of pictures, or wedding album, will not exist digitally in your camera or on your computer or in a “cloud”: you should print them. I often feel a photochemical image contains the mass of the subject and dimension; a digital image often feels as if it is mass-less. This could be nostalgia or simply how I learned to see. Others will not have this learning: they will probably never experience a photochemical image. Is this loss a tragedy, a revolution, an evolution? What have we lost, and what have we gained?
I will miss walking on to a photochemical film set. It has a magic to me. When the director says: “Action”, and the film is rolling, it feels like something is at stake. It feels important and intense. In a way, death is present in the rolling of that film – we live, right now – and the director says: “Cut”. And that moment in time is captured on film, really.
In a 2011 interview with NPR, Wil Wheaton attributed the film’s success to the director’s casting choices: “Rob Reiner found four young boys who basically were the characters we played. I was awkward and nerdy and shy and uncomfortable in my own skin and really, really sensitive, and River was cool and really smart and passionate and even at that age kind of like a father figure to some of us, Jerry was one of the funniest people I had ever seen in my life, either before or since, and Corey was unbelievably angry and in an incredible amount of pain and had an absolutely terrible relationship with his parents.”
