My suggestion would be, if you're starting to
make a film or you want to express
yourself on some sort of visual narrative, I
don't know if you have to be conscious
of your style.
I mean, you can use a sense of
an aspect of some style that you think
you might have, but be aware that it
might reveal itself to be something else, and
that's what's more important.
That's the essential of who you are and
what you're trying to say and how you're
expressing it.
You're using the tools to express it, because
ultimately, if you take away all the equipment,
you still have to be able to tell
the story.
Can't talk about my own style.
I don't know what that is, really, so
other people could do it if they want,
but I don't know how to.
So I'm trying to make the pictures, feel
the need at times to really make these
pictures for whatever that means.
To me, it means that you can't, it
means that you, it's hard for you to
continue your daily life unless you work on
this particular story or work out making a
film, so to speak.
So I'm just making the pictures, telling the
stories, trying to capture the emotions, the ideas,
and really trying to provoke it to the
best of my ability, what's left of my
time and what's left of the capacity for
my brain, basically, going further into the history
of filmmaking.
We now agree that verbal literacy is necessary,
and we take that for granted, but a
couple of thousand years ago, Socrates actually disagreed.
His argument was almost the very same, identical
to the arguments of people today who object
to the internet or to, or the people
back in the 60s and 70s who warned
about the evils of television.
Socrates worried that writing and reading would actually
lead to not truly knowing it.
He believed that if people would have stopped
memorizing, start writing and reading, they'd be in
danger of cultivating the appearance of wisdom as
opposed to the real thing.
He was afraid that reading it would take
away the actual knowledge and the understanding of
the text.
So the same kinds of questions still come
up around moving images.
They're too literal, they leave nothing to the
imagination, and they're inferior to the written word.
So now, if you're taking this class, I'm
going to take it for granted that you
don't agree with those ideas.
But if you're going to make films, I
promise you that you're going to encounter them,
because words and images have a common source.
So when you look at ancient writing, you
see that words and images are almost indistinguishable.
In fact, words are images, they're symbols.
Written Chinese and Japanese still actually look like
pictographic languages.
The written word is not superior to the
moving image.
They are both ways, they are both modes
of communication and expression of equal value.
So to me, when people talk about visual
literacy, I think that in the end, there's
just literacy.
Period.
The most important thing is to understand the
difference between certain images, or to be more
precise, certain sequences of images.
Some are meant to sell something, some are
meant to just entertain, and some are meant
to inform.
And some, and this is what we're talking
about here, are meant to tell stories.
And in so doing, pursue and discover something
surprising and mysterious.
Not all images are there to be eaten,
consumed, like fast food and forgotten, that's important
to remember.
We're not mass manufacturers, we're trying to be
filmmakers.
The world of moviemaking, where these remarkable images
came from, the stories and the worlds they
depicted, this felt very, very distant.
I mean, if I even, I did have
the dreams of maybe putting something together like
what would become a movie, but these were
purely dreams.
There was no way to actually implement this
in any way, and no way we really
thought that such a thing could happen to
us, to be able to make a film.
It was like a place that you had
to conquer, in a way, you had to
overtake and be able to do your own
thing.
So the next best thing I was able
to do, since it was a working class
family, didn't have cameras and that sort of
thing, it was too expensive.
So I was able to, the only way
I could express this desire, this impulse, I
should say, was to draw imaginary movies in
a small, small room that I was in,
in the tenements living downtown on Elizabeth Street.
And these were different genres.
Some were based on television shows I saw,
some were water-colored, some were just black
and white with ebony pencils, some were even
sepia.
A lot of those don't exist.
What does exist now is the beginnings of
an ancient Roman epic, which I never finished,
which allowed me to play with aspect ratios,
or what I now know as an aspect
ratio, in a 65 millimeter or 70 millimeter
aspect ratio.
And so this was a way of trying
to tell the stories from frame to frame.
I'd show it to a few friends, but
they felt that they were just stills, drawings,
and I explained to them that in between
the frames that were drawn, there was movement,
or you have to imagine the movement, you
see.
The only way I could try to come
up with a visual narrative or make a
movie, quote-unquote, was to draw these pictures
within frames, and sometimes it'd be a strip
of paper and maybe divide it into three
frames.
And the difference between each frame, sometimes I
found myself editing, telling the story with medium
shots, close-ups, wide shots, that sort of
thing.
Very rarely were the frames from frame one
to two or from two to three wide
shots, simply wide shots, sort of like in
the first films that were made.
I was just finding my way based upon
what I saw in the movie theater and
on television.
And so in some cases, the frames would
be cuts from one to the other.
In others, there would be frames which represented
three or four parts of the same shot.
I imagined camera movement, and I also imagined
that when the cuts were made, that there
was some sort of movement in the film,
in a way, and one would have to
use your imagination.
So when I was able to start to
actually put a film together, the only thing
I could relate to really was to go
back to those drawings and design the whole
picture on paper, which is what I did
in my first short films and pretty much
subsequently most of the films I've made.
On a practical level, it gives you an
idea of exactly what you want to get
that particular day of shooting or for the
entire schedule of the picture so that you
can utilize the time properly.
You don't make it up as you go
along on set and waste that time and
energy of everyone and money.
So it was meant as a, not just
a blueprint, but an actualization of the shots
I wanted to get exactly how they go.
I think the documentaries I've been trying to
do over the years, or the non-fiction
films, are really, for me, projects that have
no rules, in a sense.
And if they have no rules, it gets
tougher.
So, what that means is they're ripe places
for experimenting or finding another way to tell
a story, whether it's through a piece of
music or whether the editing itself becomes music,
meaning rhythm and pace.
And telling stories elliptically, I tend to want
to continue making these non-fiction films because
they, I'd hoped, or at times, feel that
they should inform the narrative structure of the
fictional films I make.
And there's a freedom in making these documentaries
or these music films, so to speak.
There's a freedom of form that loosens me
up, in a way.
Everything's included in the shooting of it.
If you are shooting certain scenes, sometimes it's
the footage that already exists.
The shooting of it, and particularly in the
editing, there is no such thing as editing,
it's writing.
Writing, editing.
You're making the film there, in that room.
And so, you can go many different ways.
It's infinite.
And so, it's really a challenge, as they
say.
It's also true of the documentary I made
about my parents, called Italian American.
In fact, I learned a lot from that
by letting them exist, I should say, within
the frame and tell the stories without intercutting
or finding obvious cinematic techniques to push time
forward or backwards.
Didn't matter.
Jump cuts, putting 12 frames of Black Leader
slugs in the middle of a story, just
to get to another point.
Just holding on the person, really, was a
great lesson.
And the pictures I've made that are set
within the world where I grew up, or
related to that world, like Mean Streets, or
Raging Bull, or Goodfellas, so and so.
I think, for example, one aspect of it
that's really important is the body language.
It's very important.
The way that people relate to each other,
physically.
I suppose it was that fact which let
it take center stage and didn't complicate it
with cutting or anything superficially cinematic in the
creation of certain kinds of stories.
In many cases, it's when to hold the
shot, when to let the people speak, when
to just watch them, you know, and not
move the camera, and not cut.
You find what's there in that, in a
sense, they inhabit the film.
The use of voiceover is very important to
me.
It was just a natural element in making
movies.
I appreciated so much over the years seeing
films with voiceover, particularly Kind Hearts and Coronets,
with that wonderfully restrained humor of the voiceover,
the irony, which put me in the mind
thereof, so to speak, of using ironic voiceover
in Goodfellas.
The inherent humor in some of the voiceover
in that film comes, sparked from Kind Hearts
and Coronets or other films at the time.
Particularly, there was also a wonderful use of
voiceover in Shoot the Piano Player, Truffaut, and
Jules and Jim.
I like that very much.
It goes back and forth through time and
space, building up the relationship of the two
men and their friends in that world, the
world of the left bank at that time.
And for me, yes, it has a lot
of exposition, meaning explaining what you're seeing, but
somehow the words don't necessarily, the words don't,
are not needed to fully explain it, what
you're seeing.
In other words, the narration itself is not
expository in a dull sense, in a didactic
way.
It somehow expresses the joy and the warmth
and the love between these characters, and also
the freewheeling aspect of this kind of thinking,
this life that they're living, or the life
they'd like to live, too.
And so I thought, what about a whole
movie that way?
And that became Goodfellas.
And so there was a spark there.
Barry Lyndon's another good example of voiceover.
The language of the voiceover in that particular
film, the language itself.
And so that led to, of course, the
use of the voiceover in Age of Innocence.
When we were about to make the film,
there were those who were in the production
who turned to me and said, who's talking?
I didn't realize people took it that literally.
Who's talking?
The storyteller.
I don't know.
The person telling you the story.
Or the person living the story.
And so I never took it that literal,
in many cases, I believe.
So Age of Innocence, we had the opportunity
there to play with voiceover from the book
of Edith Wharton, using her language, in very
much the same way, not the same way,
but very much inspired by the use of
language in Barry Lyndon and a number of
other films and voiceover.
The whole point is that when I found
narration, the use of narration and voiceover as
part of the storytelling, as natural to me
in the very first film I made, the
very first short film I made, it's covered
with voiceover.
It's an element of the storytelling in film,
not a literary device.
In the case of Age of Innocence, we're
able to take advantage of the literary because
we can take the voiceover directly from what
was written in the book, in the novel
by Edith Wharton.
But for me, it was one of the
cinematic elements in the film, not a literary
element at all.
And not something to just give you exposition
as to what's happening in the film.