AND A VIDEO CLIP, TOO
In the above YouTube clip taken at the New York Film Festival this past Sunday, Brian De Palma and Noah Baumbach talk about meeting each other for the first time. Meanwhile, The Playlist's Cory Everett posted a nice summary of the whole conversation yesterday, which includes the detail that De Palma and Baumbach first met at Paul Schrader's 50th birthday party in 1996. There are many more great tidbits in this summary, including how Wes Anderson turned to De Palma for advice on visualizing wind for the climax of Moonrise Kingdom. Here is the last part of Everett's summary:
"Sometimes it takes more than one person to come up with creative solutions, and that’s why both directors are happy to have someone they can show their work to for advice. De Palma’s new group of cinematic confidantes includes Baumbach, director Wes Anderson and director Jake Paltrow. He said his friendship with this new group reminds him of his time with the Movie Brats of the '70s. 'When I was starting to make films in the '60s and went out to Hollywood, there were a group of directors known as the Movie Brats: Marty [Scorsese], Steven [Spielberg], Frances [Ford Coppola] and George [Lucas]. We all hung out together and we were all making movies, movies that all bombed of course, but we were all making movies. And we forged an alliance where we would look at each other's rough cuts, help each other with editing, suggest scripts, and we did that for quite a while until we all went off in our different places. And I kinda miss that fraternity of directors.'
"He said he was fortunate to be in a new group of directors, but 'it’s a small group and it’s not going to get any bigger.' For Passion, DePalma had passed the script to his fellow directors and originally included a convoluted dream-within-a-dream structure that they eventually convinced him to discard. 'They read it and they liked the script very much but I’d done this dream sequence and done a take off on Inception, a movie I quite liked. And the whole idea was the phone was in the safe in the third level dream and my fellow directors looked at me and said, "Get rid of that.”'
"'It took three of us, too.' Baumbach added.
"'It was unanimous, when you have unanimous consent [that’s what you do]. So it’s very helpful,' DePalma said.
“'There is an isolated experience to being a director,' Baumbach said. 'It’s very communal because there’s a crew, but it’s only you. You’re the one on the hook. And seeing it in the tradition of Brian and the people he came up with and hearing stories of how they worked on each other's movies. And Steven [Spielberg] came in on the set of Scarface and directed a few shootouts in the final big battle. Both it’s cool to hear those things and it opened us up. It made it less precious in a way, all of us, we can talk about it and help each other.' When Wes was having trouble coming up with how to visualize shooting wind for the climax of his latest Moonrise Kingdom he turned to De Palma who offered up a solution: make sure you have things in the air. Simple, but it works.
“'Essentially we feel the same about movies and moviemaking but we come at it in entirely different ways,' said Baumbach."