The Watchmen trailer

In the first Watchmen trailer the actors don't perform as much as they pose, moving from one iconic comic book stance to another. The Dr. Manhattan sequence is a good example. Trapped in a science experiment gone wrong, the doctor doesn't try to escape or shield himself but transitions between classic super hero postures expressing trepidation, awe and then transformation. Like Delsarte's theatrical gestures (above) they indicate the content of the scene through stylized conventions.

Josh Becker's response

(Above: a complete copy of Josh Becker's If I Had a Hammer is available on youtube.)

Those of you who have been reading the blog know that I find Josh Becker an interesting character. He answers pretty much any directing question you care to ask on his site. Here's his response to my question, something I've wondered about for awhile.

Name: ron
E-mail:
Hi Josh,

Question: Looking back, how do you feel about your career as a writer/director? Do you tend to feel happy about what you've accomplished? Or are you more prone to feel like you should have accomplished more by now? Do you like your role as someone who exists (on purpose) on the outskirts of the film industry? Do you ever wish you had greater mainstream success or fame?

Thanks for all your work on the site.

Ron

Dear ron:

No, I'm not satisfied at all with my career. And yes, some success would be nice. I certainly don't feel like I've lived up to my potential. However, it's not just me, it's the entire film industry, which totally changed in the last 30 years. Basically, I was tricked. I grew up watching and studying great movies, and Hollywood doesn't make great movies anymore, nor are they even interested in attempting them. There isn't a single studio executive at this point who wouldn't be FAR happier making the 17th Batman movie instead of the 1st of anything. In 1977 with the release and enormous success of "Star Wars," Hollywood conciously decided that kids were more important than adults, as did our whole society, too. It's like a singing voice, if you don't use it you lose it. Hollywood CAN'T make good movies anymore because it's been so long since they've made one, there's nothing to base it on. I trained myself in classical storytelling and filmmaking, and that's no longer of any use at all. In 2001, after eight years of directing idiotic TV shows, and not the slightest interest by any distributor in my at least somewhat intelligent, reasonably original, independent feature, "If I Had a Hammer," I knew it was time to leave. I haven't yet given up -- I sent out two scripts this week -- but I no longer hold out much hope that anything of mine will ever get made, nor have I the slightest interest in raising money independently anymore. So, there it is.

Josh

The Udvar-Hazy hobby punk heaven

Hobby punk is the pre-digital technology of the second World War continuing into hobby products of the leisure time fifties. Hobby punk evokes the moment before technology became invisible, miniaturized into integrated circuits. In hobby punk we see individual transistors and capacitors soldered onto breadboards. It is the era of technology that existed before computer-aided design, where technology was defined by primitive, easy-to-create shapes and held together with screws, braces and solder. In the place of computer-defined curves we find hammered out-sheet metal, wood and wire. Hobby punk speaks to a particular scale and mode of production. It refers to the kind of thing that someone could make in their garage given the time and inclination using ordinary hand tools and common equipment. It is the proto-garage aesthetic, things that look barely held together because they exist somewhere between prototype and production model. Hobby punk is partially repurposed, partially customized bricolage in motion. It is covered with handwritten notations, worn, and leaks oil. Noise film is a hobby punk movie.

From the Udvar-Hazy Space & Air museum—


Target drone used for military exercises.


Hand-written notations on early computer system.


Interior of early satellite.


Exterior of the same satellite with solar panels.


Early 128k computer painted mint green.


Early prototype of one-person helicopter.


Late WWII German surface-air missle with wood fins.

fresh footage: 8 to 10 minutes

I went through the cut today to see how much footage is in noise film that was not reshot. Answer: about 8 to 10 minutes, roughly half since the film is 16 minutes long. But that figure is an estimate. This does NOT include footage where we had to reshoot using a different approach (or having changed the story) because the first approach didn't work.

So why did we shoot so much? There was a lot of extra footage shot including test footage. We shot lots of stuff that we didn't end up using: Ben walking around outside, the truck driving toward the horizon, the attempts to rebuild the spinner, etc. We also shot a lot of pickups, stuff we forgot to shoot the first time around.

I guess the basic idea was to see if it's true that we shot everything twice. The answer is, no, only about half of the film.

The 'Our Town' conundrum

Today I watched parts of the Paul Newman version of Our Town, a play I had heard about but never seen. I just wanted to watch the end where Emily goes back in time to revisit her life as a twelve year old. Overcome by the richness of the mundane events she asks, "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?" Answers Newman's stage manager, "No. The saints and poets, maybe. They do some."

This conundrum has been part of my life for years. Once I said to my friend Katie, "wouldn't it be nice to be able to travel back in time and see what things were like?" By this I meant go back in time with today's eyes, to walk around and see everything as wonderful and strange. She said no. I took it to mean that Katie, as a nature lover, had a different sense of time. Going back 20 or 30 years wouldn't make much difference to the way you saw a forest or mountain range (conservation concerns aside). I then assumed that my desire was really an urban one and that urban living created a temporal sense that potentially led to wistfulness. I even wrote a story about this. A villain is being hunted down by primitive natives. He runs toward a hill where he unveils a time machine. "Behold!" he says, expecting the savages to bow down before him in awe of his invention. Instead, the savages rip him to pieces. "I could have told you" winces our hero. "Time travel is fascinating only to city dwellers."

About 15 years ago my mom got stomach cancer which is often fatal. I asked a friend what it would mean to make the most of our time together. She said, "why don't you buy her some flowers?" When I asked Maria the same question some years later, she said, "what kind of stupid question is that?" What she meant is that the nature of our existence is such that we can only let things slip by. We do not and wouldn't want to live our lives with Emily's sense of retrospect. My mom, by the way, is still alive and kicking.

When you have children the Our Town conundrum always comes up. Everyone will tell you, "enjoy them while they're young... they grow up so fast." Yet you can't look at your kids as you would in retrospect ten years from now. Instead of treating them as people you'd treat them with fascination as museum pieces.

Noise film has strands of the Our Town conundrum running through it. The conundrum is about consciousness and how our consciousness changes things and our appreciation of events. Let's say that your leg gets chopped off. You bemoan your fate and get angry and depressed. Now let's say that you're given an outrageous cosmic choice. Your first born child dies or you get your leg chopped off. Most of us would choose the second option, of course. In both cases, you end up the same. But the second instance is easier to take. Your loss, as a sacrifice, takes on a vastly different sense of significance. Another way of looking at it is to say that our beliefs play a great role in how we respond to events. Maybe we would all be happier if we could manipulate our beliefs in such a way that we lived in peace and gratitude. But beliefs are given to us. For many things, we are subject to beliefs, not the other way around. And that is one way to think about the ending of Noise film.

Alpha 81 is locked

Our last alpha version is locked. There are a couple of non-timing related shots that aren't finished, but shouldn't make a difference.

Ben, I'm relying on your amazing ability as an actor...

The other night, I finished rewriting the script taking into account the various notes I've received on Alpha 77. Ben is still probably going to feel that there is much more narration than necessary. I leave him with this story from Mike Figgis' book...

"When I was making One Night Stand I had a confrontation with Wesley Snipes. He questioned the substance of a scene and said that he found it hard to believe that he would do what was in the script. It was a scene where he spills ink on his shirt and Nastassja Kinski offers him her room in which to change. Wesley—quite correctly—said that he wouldn't go upstairs with a strange blonde woman to change a shirt. His body was in great shape, and he'd change right there in the lobby. 'So why am I going upstairs with her?' Again, this was a very public debate in front of the crew and the actors. I thought for a while and then said the following. "Wesley, you are entirely correct, the scene is not particularly well conceived and I hope, will occupy only a short amount of time in the film, so that the audience doesn't come to the same conclusion as you. However, without the scene, the film will not work—there will be no romance. So I rely on your amazing ability as an actor to get us through this moment convincingly and quickly.' He was happy with this response and did just that. The mistake would have been to argue the point."

Reshooting the last scene

Today Ben, David and I reshot the last scene, the one with the flyers. If my car crashed, we would have lost 75% of the readers of this blog. I told Ben he had to come along since he's the one who had such firm ideas about how it should look. Ben was very good as second unit director— he knew what he wanted. In this case, this means that Ben was discerning, really wanted the scene to work and knew how to make it work. This inspired confidence. So not knowing what you want means you're not sure what the scene is supposed to do, you're not sure how to do it and you don't inspire confidence. This made me feel like I didn't have to think about the scene unless I wanted to. I could just worry about what I was doing. So knowing what you want doesn't mean that you're closed to other people's ideas. It just means that you're taking care of things and you know where we're going and how it's all going to fit together.

I was also thinking about my "shoot it twice" approach. I was trying to remember how many scenes I was able to complete without reshooting, oh wait, here's the answer—NONE. I was telling Ben and David that because we have so many props, the first shoot is the essentially the dress rehearsal. The performance depends on the entire scene, not on actors who can change and adopt when transplanted into a location. Using this kind of approach, reshooting is almost a given.

My other hypothesis is that we don't have many standard shots in the film. For example, a typical film will have dialogue scenes that you shoot in certain standard ways—over the shoulder, two shot, or whatever. Noise film isn't like that. We have interactions with devices, Ben noticing things, Ben getting attacked by mysterious non-entities. So just getting the information to come across is complicated, especially when you don't have too much experience.

Plus, a lot of what we're doing is trying to balance certain ambiguities. If you want everything to be crystal clear, I think it makes it easier. But when you're trying to create certain interactions—like how do you make a bird appear without actually showing it appear, or how do you get across the idea that Ben is being pulled into the desert by an idea, it's just harder. Or maybe I just don't know what I want.

Chewy hollow centers

Dan and I were talking today and we reiterated one of the ideas we had discussed earlier. The film is like a parody in the sense that it takes certain conventions and tries to turn them inside out and upside down in a playful way. Examples...

> Everyone knows there's supposed to be a build and climax at the end. We have a conceptual build and a cartoon fire. The whole ending claims to overturn all we know about physics! What an incredible tale! But it's presented in fuzzy abstract text. You don't see anything, you just imagine most of it.

>Everyone knows that clues take you from one place to the next. In our movie, unlike the Da Vinci Code, however, the clues are open to question. For example, the shrine interior is based on the idea of dinosaur bones in which they restore a whole dinosaur from just a couple of bone fragments. Is it a real creature or just wishful thinking? Is that really a spinner plate in there? Does XNHILO really spell "ex nihilo?" Is it a real clue or just wishful thinking?

>There's a protagonist caught up in a conspiracy and two other characters--one trying to help him and the other trying to kill him. But you only see the protagonist.

It's as if I tore out the center of a typical conspiracy story and built a film around the shape of the hole that remained. A film for a movie-savvy generation.

To do: Alpha 78+

RESHOOT
>Shrine interior with wide angle
>Last scene

EDITING CHANGES
>Slow down slow motion star bounce.
>Make slow zoom to broken spinner upon first appearance longer.
>Make flashbacks longer.
>redit final sequence ala Dan's transition
>Make credits bigger
>Make zoom out from star on desert ground longer.
>Make it clearer that Ben's looking at a video screen in red room
>Longer dissolve to cloud. Make that section feel like "morphing weirdness."

THINGS TO WRITE
>Write ending codex narration

AUDIO TO RECORD
>Sounds needed: tape recorder, typing
>Ben's narration

FOR MASTER/ONLINE
>Delete desert tower
>fix lens spot
>Correct the early scenes dirty
>fix blinks
>fx shot-delete paper from Ben's hand on stairs
>insert garbage removal shot
>insert truck shot
>Make clouds glitchy
>fix burning house scene
>desert map CU

Dan's notes on Alpha 77

>Record VO for end segment and possibly segue into VO which then turns into noise. Possibly cut out from end typing earlier to create clearer connection from typing to flyer.

>Take out, "crow, a symbol of death," but he liked the other text about being called and haunted.

>Delete "over-unity effects" VO.

>Intro needs some kind of VO to set up later VO. Could be Ben mumbling, like "input .01 volts..." etc. etc.

>Slow down slow motion star bounce.

>Make slow zoom to spinner upon first appearance longer.

>Longer dissolve to cloud. Make that section feel like "morphing weirdness."

>Make desert VO more directed since Ben seems to be charging ahead

>Make flashbacks longer.

>Sounds needed: tape recorder, typing

>Make clouds glitchy?

>Make zoom out from star on desert ground longer.

>He liked all the "conjecture/question" text.

>Supported idea of adding the new VO to make ending clearer in terms of backstory.

>Change codex VO line to something like "obscured by physics."

>At end also suggested many more flyers "filling up the windows."

>Restore overlapping audio for microfiche scene.

>Felt overall structure makes sense. Noted that each segment (stars/mystery/bad thing) gets longer and longer which is appropriate.

>He liked the reaction to the dead bird since Ben didn't totally freak out, but treated the bird as an odd, awesome but not totally horrific event. As director, I took credit for this.

BTW, Dan said he's starting on the scoring/sound design next week.

How anime works

Sean loves Pokemon so I'm always walking past him watching and seeing bits and pieces of the show. Unlike Dan, I kind of like it and I was so excited to see Misty again in this weekend's DVD. I wondered what happened to her. A Pokemon battle, I discovered, is incomprehensible without the narration provided by the onlookers like Brock or May. You just see a lot of abstraction on screen and the onlookers explain what's happening and whether it's good or bad. Speed Racer worked in exactly the same way. Most of the time, you're just seeing flashing things and the only way you know what's happening is by the expression on the Racer family's faces. In the case of Pokemon, I think the aesthetic is driven by financial and storytelling concerns. The fights are visually simple (low frame rate) with abstraction taking the place of action. Plus, the onlookers are good for providing the necessary exposition—"What's he doing? You can't fight a water type with an electric type! (or whatever)" It works for Pokemon but generally speaking, it seems better if the audience is able to make those judgements about what's happening for themselves.

Papermart.com

This belongs in my series of images that remind me of the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The last scene in our film is supposed to be reminiscent of this. From Papermart in Los Angeles.

Final scene problems

Ben called me today because he remembered his problem with the final scene. When David and I are walking by, he said it looks like we're walking single file which looks unnatural. I told him this was an optical illusion. I was actually about 10" further away from the camera than David, but it probably looks like we're walking single file because the size of my head compensated for the depth. (The surest sign you have is a big head is when your mom assures you, "No, you don't have a big head. In fact it's kind of small.")

So Ben and I started talking about all the problems with the final scene. It's really not that bad but there are a lot of small annoying things. So I said I'd try to arrange to reshoot. Here are the problems from biggest to least:

1. I shouldn't have put so much text on the flyer because it makes the audience want to read it. So in version 77 I blurred out most of the text but of course it looks artificial.

2. The shot is kind of dead because there aren't enough people walking in the wide shot. I have some accidental footage of David walking through the shot that really gives it life. This would also help cut better when we go from medium to wide.

3. The tilt starts stationary with the flyers centered. I realized when editing that I should have started the tilt pointed down and then moved up so I could cut into the shot right before the flyers were centered.

4. It would have been nice if we put a lot more flyers, maybe twice as many to make the scene more dramatic.

5. I didn't look at the flyers carefully enough. One says "2007" in huge letters. Another has color print outs.

6. Ben thinks the flyer arrangement was too unnaturally haphazard.

Movies that try to start movements

There's something I find arrogant and annoying about movies that seem to want to create cultural trends. I felt that way when watching Speed Racer which for me came across as the Wachowskis trying to jump start a photo-anime-pop fashion movement. I also felt that way about Be Kind Rewind, as if Michel Gondry was hoping to incite us all to create communal films. Network irked me because it wanted to be so prophetic and clever. And you can bet I didn't see Pay It Forward.

The Trouble With Humor

Mary Wickes

I've been reliving my childhood watching films that I saw on the big screen when I was a kid. I watched bits and pieces of Lt. Robin Crusoe, USN a couple of months ago. Dick Van Dyke stars as a Navy pilot who goes down in the Pacific and makes a home for himself on a tropical island (along with Nancy Kwan). In the mid-sixties, the association between the military/World War II and the South Pacific was still fresh in peoples' minds so there is a strange connection between films like this one and the mid-century Tiki/Lounge aesthetic.

Tonight I watched bits of The Trouble with Angels, a Hayley Mills movie in which she plays a rebellious student at an all-girls Catholic School. The film is a loose series of vignettes of the girls getting in trouble but the narrative ties up with a surprisingly emotional ending. There is very little momentum in the film—it really is just incidents pasted together. Angels was directed by Ida Lupino (Bewitched, Gilligan's Island , The Twilight Zone) and includes appearances by a stunning Camilla Sparv and a born-to-play-nuns Mary Wickes.

There's something about comedy that makes it antithetical to art films. Both of these films are shot flat like TV shows and have a very loose, almost careless feel. It's like there's nothing standing between you and the raw presence of the leads who look as if they're not getting any direction at all. Guy Maddin's able to pull of humor but there's a partial fit there because of his loose, quirky hand-held style. I like the fact that Michel Gondry was willing to give humor a shot in Be Kind Rewind, but the problem was too tough for him to solve. He was trying to do something that James McKenney pulled off in Automatons when the enemy leader communicates using a brick-sized wrist communicator. The humor is dry, almost indiscernible, a humor of situation without a punchline. It's like the scene in Superman II when debris is falling from the sky as Superman battles Zod and out of the corner of your eye you see a convertible putting its top up. Be Kind, however, just comes off as if it's trying too hard. The car, the metal hats—it's just too self-conscious. Wes Anderson did a great job in The Life Aquatic. It's an art film with a nimble, gently comedic touch. Worth studying for combining art film and comedy.

Ben, Britton and Elizabeth's take on alpha 77

My testing strategy for noise film alpha 77 is not too scientific. I brought it to Ben's house and he had some friends and relatives there so they saw the cut (Mona saw it because I was having lunch with her). The reaction of Britton and Elizabeth as outsiders was interesting. I think they were pretty interested in watching until the end when it all got abstract and seemed to peter out. At a certain point all you're seeing is text flashing by on the screen.

> Ben and Elizabeth, unlike Mona, didn't have any trouble understanding the very beginning scene.

> Unlike Mona Ben didn't have any trouble seeing the falling stars.

> Ben thinks the CU of the stars falling is confusing unneeded. I think he's right.

>He thinks the flashback scene of the broken spinner needs to be longer, more of a climax in his character's thinking. Sounds good to me.

>He really liked the interior shot of the spinner box. Much better than the old one. I told him that's one of the shots I did when I finally figured out how to light. It reads as old and mysterious now for him unlike before when he said it was too much like a Hollywood prop.

>The time lapse clouds don't seem to bother him too much, but EVERYONE mentions them in one way or another so I should probably get rid of them. I think they're just too overly dramatic and look like a royalty-free clip.

>I liked Britton's reaction during the bird scene. "What's that, a dead bird?" Then the close up cuts in. That's exactly the response I wanted. The prop seems to have worked well. At least no one tells me it looks fake. I found that styrofoam really looks like bird guts on camera.

>The shrine interior before the microfiche scene doesn't have enough oomph. That gave me the idea to reshoot it with the wide angle.

>Krissy said, "is that microfiche?" I was happy with that... at least it comes across. Better than, what the hell is that?

>Ben thinks there are too many words in the transition from ex nihilo to the red room. He thinks there should only be one long exposition. I think he's right.

>He really liked the red room sequence in terms of it making sense and the color correction. Almost everyone who sees the film thinks it looks nice in general. That's great, but every time I see it I think how much better it would look if I could use better lenses. Ben was also really happy with his bleary eyes that he created by gouging his thumbs into his eye sockets before the shot. No method actor he.

>He still thinks I have to make it clearer that the codex video is coming from the screen. He thinks brightening the screen in the red room will work. I told him I might have to reshoot a slow push in to the screen which is in a cabinet that David gave me. Problem: Ben uses it to keep paint.

>There was something that was bothering him about the last sequence--the ending, but he couldn't figure out what. I think I just cut too fast after head wipe.

>As the camera tilted up into the sky Ben made a white noise sound. He knew it was coming.

>I found that the credits are too small at standard DV resolution.

>Ben hated the final temp piano music (from Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain). Hmm. I thought it was pretty good in terms of mood.

>Ben tells people that this thing took three years to make. In December, it will be four years.