MM: There are zero limitations if you’re willing to take your time. While I was definitely inspired by the spirit of those, for lack of better word, mumblecore movies, I wanted to challenge ourselves to take it one step further. The story is a simple comedy, but I wanted it to be cinematic. I wanted to use all the tools that telling a story with a camera has to offer. I wanted the performances to be loose, but the narrative to be strong. So we just chipped away at it, bit by bit, scene by scene, on weekends. Friday nights we’d meet at the location (a large church complex), build our sets, set up lights, maybe get a couple shots done, and then sleep on the floor. Saturday we’d wake up - shoot all day long. Sunday morning, church was in service, so we’d shoot any MOS scenes, or scenes outside the church (otherwise the organ would drown out the dialogue), and get the rest after the church was cleared. We did this on and off for 2 years. Shooting in this way was a complete luxury. We could take risks, knowing that we could re-shoot if they didn’t work. We spent a lot of time rehearsing. The only partial downside was for my main actor Stephen Hale, who actually lives in this church in real life. For the entire time of the shoot, his little apartment was full of props and lights and c-stands. The dude could barely move around, it was so cluttered. He would email or call us on a daily basis to let us know how awful his life was. As a director though, I was in no rush—this did nothing but help his performance.
[ music & movies. people & pictures. words & whisky &c. ]
stu willis: filmmaker. photographer.
| twitter | flickr | imdb |
the blog of www.stuwillis.com blimps are cool too
So, if Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is not a searing masterpiece for the ages whose quality overwhelms any and all problems with its politics, why was it so easy for me to ignore those problems? Another possible answer is that the film is too silly, too steeped in and conscious of its unreality, to take seriously enough to criticize. This is probably closer to the mark, though not for the obvious reason that Scott Pilgrim is a semi-cartoon about people who fight video game battles in real life. Rather, it’s because of the way the film depicts romance and sexual attraction. The male gaze is almost entirely absent from Scott Pilgrim. Its female characters are not sexualized or fetishized—most of them spend the film covered from head to toe and muffled in heavy coats, the better to protect themselves from the snowy Toronto weather that is almost its own character. Scott, meanwhile, is almost asexual. He gets a huge kick out of modest intimacies such as holding hands or cuddling—or rather, he doesn’t. His excitement at these acts is emotional, not sexual, and the sexual component of his desire for Ramona and Knives gets almost no play in the film. This approach has the effect of making the film and its characters seem innocent and childlike. Scott isn’t a manchild; he’s just a child. It’s easy, therefore, to disassociate his behavior towards the women in his life from the familiar figure of the entitled nerd/gamer/musician/hipster who believes that having been the target of bullying absolves them from ever examining their behavior towards others—the same figure that, as I understand it, the original Scott Pilgrim was created to examine and, to a certain extent, decry.
So, he [Joss asked, “Why is my avatar a female? Am I a literary transvestite? Why do I identify with these girls?”
The revelation, when it came, surprised him. For the 7 years he wrote Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, he identified with Xander, funny, clueless and never getting laid. Then when he was writing an extended piece of prose about a Buffy-type character, a first person narrative, it struck him that he was bucketing therapy on to the page. Only then did he finally see it – “Buffy was me.”
Just a reminder for people to vote in the IF AWARDS for my film clip for Go/No-Go’s “Catching Up With You”. Please. I am begging now. Its one of my few projects that I’m genuinely quite proud of and want people to see it and vote for it and love it too.
We shot it in sequence, in camera. There is no compositing there. Let your mind boggle.
Thanks!
Next time, stick a small mic on the RED or a wireless feed from the sound mixer to the RED. Spending two days syncing rushes isn’t worth the time of whoever is doing it.
[palmface[
By contrast, Abd el-Kader conducted war in as civilized a manner as possible. He devised a series of rules for the treatment of prisoners which were, in some ways, a forerunner to the official rules codified in the Geneva Convention in 1949. In one instance, he released a group of French captive soldiers because he did not have enough food to feed them. Some prisoners were so impressed with Abd el-Kader’s treatment of them that they formally defected to the other side, and served as foreign advisors to the emir.
![] Fincher @RED [via Mark Romanek]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l6v46wirNI1qz73ubo1_500.jpg)
