The worst thing about cellphones is that they look so boring. Ordinary phone calls used to be pretty cinematic.
I think there's something about a character being tied to a specific physical space during an emotionally-charged moment that helps make for a more interesting frame.
Modern cellphones can work for horror or comedy, I guess. But I don't know how to make them cinematic. Same with modern cars. There's something about the efficient sameness of the design that empties these things of real cinematic value.
EUPHORIA probably most successfully makes cellphones and cellphone calls fairly cinematic -- I think they have some of the best cinematography going, so that makes sense.
This EUPHORIA shot in particular -- the screen of a cellphone reflected in Cassie's eye -- takes the innate limitations of the cellphone and harnesses it for really interesting, inventive visual storytelling.
I've been meaning to see DECISION TO LEAVE, so I'm glad to have an added reason to hurry up and do so since it's brought up the most often as a counter to my "cellphones in movies are boring" complaint.
A few people point out that the landline phones themselves don't make the shots visually interesting. That it's the framing. But I guess that's part of my point. With landline phones, the spatial limitations force the DP, director, actors, & design folks to be more creative.
Visually, being stuck in one spot can be a blessing because you're often forced to spend more time & creative energy on the blocking (how to make an actor reveal character in a limited space), as well as camera placement & design elements (if just the phone & cord colors).
And of course a director *should* be able to manage all this with a cellphone. But I think it happens less often -- partially because a modern cellphone is often just a black rectangle, but mostly because the lack of spatial limitations can lead to uninspired blocking & framing.
It's a sign of an especially gifted director to find ways to use cellphones like Bong Joon-ho does in PARASITE. A scene like this is not just visually & dramatically interesting, but also revelatory in terms of the film's class divisions. So, it can be done.
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One things I love about older movies -- especially films from the 1970s -- is how much of the texture of daily life you can soak up while watching them 50 years later. What rich, poor, & middle class people wore, drank, ate, listened to, read, smoked, drove, argued about, etc.
It feels less & less common to have the daily textures of ordinary 2023 lives make it on screen in 2023. Either the stories take place in an explicitly different reality, or they take place in some cleaner, brighter, more hygienic, more aspirational version of sorta-reality.
I found myself thinking about this while driving my sons to school here in L.A. In order to communicate the vibes of our drive, I think I'd have to show them films set in the 1970s. Which is a shame, because story-wise, there's so much drama embedded here, for good & ill.
In my first draft of a script, I’m not necessarily trying to schematically plot out a story. It’s more like I’m trying to generate an energy field. I’m trying to make it so as many characters as possible create heat on the page.
A character can create heat by pulling other characters towards them or by conflicting with them. They can create heat by the intensity of their desire, fear, or neuroses. Or they can create heat by interacting with genre expectations in an unexpected or powerful way.
Left to my own devices, I rarely outline. Instead, I try to daydream as much of the movie I can. I try to put off writing until my brain is absolutely overflowing with heat-generating ideas and images and details, and only then do I start formally writing down story beats.
REMEMBER MY NAME (1978). Geraldine Chaplin is genius as a woman recently released from prison who begins stalking Anthony Perkins. What begins as a basic FATAL ATTRACTION type setup -- a decade before that film was made -- gradually & patiently subverts all such easy tropes.
Chaplin's live-wire tightrope performance as a tiny, chain-smoking walking mystery who has about five different ways of speaking depending on her emotional situation should be obsessed over the way people get fixated on say Dustin Hoffman or Joaquin Phoenix or whomever.
Chaplin makes you feel about three specific competing emotions in about every scene. She invites sympathy, fear, curiosity, compassion, even when she gives Alfre Woodard a double titty-twister & a knee to the crotch after a workplace dispute, or shanks a redneck with a pencil.
Geraldine Chaplin, after she was cast in DOCTOR ZHIVAGO: "I know I've gotten everything because I'm Charlie Chaplin's daughter." She's actually one of my favorite nepotism cases -- I don't know how else an actress with her singular, almost proto-Björk energy would've broken in.
Every quote I've read from Robert Altman has overflowed with praise for her improvisational abilities. Some of my favorite parts of NASHVILLE are her scenes as Opal -- pretending to be a BBC reporter -- walking around junkyards, dictating brilliantly batshit cultural criticism.
Apparently, Altman simply liked the look of the two locations where these scenes take place -- a junkyard of cars, and a field of schoolbuses -- and asked Chaplin to walk around with a recorder, making up shit. If I recall, she did both scenes in just a couple of unbroken takes.
FWIW, the film books I've found to be most useful:
ON FILM-MAKING, Alexander Mackendrick
CUT TO THE CHASE, Sam O'Steen
IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE, Walter Murch
THE CONVERSATIONS, Murch & Ondaatje
GETTING AWAY WITH IT, Soderbergh & Lester
CONVERSATIONS WITH SCORSESE
all Pauline Kael
Another big one for me is Peter Bogdanovich's massive tome of interviews w/ classic directors, WHO THE DEVIL MADE IT. Endless great working anecdotes and practical philosophizing from directors like Howard Hawks, Fritz Lang, Don Siegel, and so on:
I assume most people have read HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT, but stumbling across it in the library as a community college student was pretty paradigm shifting in terms of my artistic philosophy, regardless of medium (e.g., I used to want to be the Alfred Hitchcock of American poetry).