(تم النسخ بواسطة TurboScribe.ai. الترقية إلى غير محدود لإزالة هذه الرسالة.) It happens quite often that you come back
with the impression from shooting, oh this was
a great moment and so, but in context,
in editing, it doesn't really work out, it
doesn't fit.
So you have to be careful that you
do not enforce your will and your structure
on your material.
It has happened to some films where you
can tell that the footage was squeezed into
a form and into a flow of narration
that was not within the nature of the
footage.
You sense it as an audience and what
I'm doing is quite often I consider my
footage as if I found it somewhere, somebody
made it.
So let's be curious, what's there?
What does the material tell you?
What does it have to offer?
And all of a sudden you discover elements
in the footage that you would never have
discovered if you had had a very strong
will to enforce upon the footage.
What I do prepare during shooting is, let's
say, creating long-term, over a full hour
of film, a climate which makes a seemingly
unobtrusive shot into something grandiose, land of silence
and darkness.
If you see the scene at the end
with a deaf and blind man who touches
and feels the branches of a tree and
by itself it is insignificant, but the film
sensitizes you more than an hour, an hour
and a half almost, until you are there.
Or for example in Aguirre, The Wrath of
God, throughout the film you see the army
or the troop of Spanish conquistadors and they
have a clear goal, they move from left
to right.
When they are floating in the water on
the raft, somehow, imperceptibly, bit by bit, very
carefully planned, we lose orientation because they are
losing orientation.
And at the end of the film, and
we showed a clip, it seems to go
in circles.
In fact, the camera is circling around it.
It's like a vicious circle which is going
into infinity.
And having a movement throughout a movie very,
very elaborately planned until it ends in an
infinite circle, that's something which was anticipated for
editing.
The 22nd of February.
Most of the men are so weak and
sick with fever that they cannot even stand.
The soldier Justo Gonzales has drunk my ink
thinking it was medicine.
I cannot write anymore.
We are drifting in circles.
When we watch the footage, I write logbooks
and I love this very solid paper, like
doing aquarelles for artists.
And I write down what I see and
I give it some sort of time code.
And when I come across something very, very
strong, I give it one exclamation mark.
Sometimes you find two exclamation marks and sometimes
you find three of them.
And in these cases, I know this is
footage, it is so intense, it is so
strong.
If I do not use this in the
film, I have lived in vain.
And I actually write down quite a bit.
You can see how much there is written
down and how far I follow the footage
of everyone.
And sometimes I start to write commentary, which
I do later in editing.
But because I write it down in longhand,
I can memorize footage for a very, very
long time, or not very long time, but
a lot of footage, up to 30, 40
hours, I know by heart, like learning a
poem by heart.
And I could say to the editor, let's
not go into take one and take two,
because in both cases, there's a dialogue mistake.
In this, there's something wrong.
Let's only go for the three exclamation marks.
And I keep writing, writing, writing, writing.
And that's the only time I look at
the footage.
When you watch your footage for the first
time, and probably for the last time for
much of it, you are very, very attentive.
So you cannot do it too long.
I do it maybe six hours, maximum seven
hours, and you exhaust yourself and you do
not store anything in your memory anymore.
So depending on how much footage you have,
and I shoot very small amounts of footage,
but sometimes I end up for a big
feature film with, let's say, 40 hours of
footage.
In this case, it will take me, let's
say, a week to go through the entire
thing.
And I do that very systematically, and I
do not start to edit until I've seen
it all.
It is a process that you cannot learn
at once.
I just would advise, keep open and try
to find out what did this strange guy
deliver here into my editing room, and forget
that the strange guy was yourself.
It depends on how much footage you have,
but I have never edited a film all
on my own, because I always found it
very right and very valuable to have a
second set of eyes and a second opinion,
or a separate opinion.
You see, I'm not working with yes-men.
Nobody who works with me is a yes
-man.
And so it's healthy to look at it
together with someone else.
We start actually working from the beginning to
the end.
We say, how should we begin it, and
what should come next?
And now we have a long dialogue sequence.
We need some landscape.
What do we do now?
We need a moment for music.
We need a moment for sitting back in
contemplation for the audience.
So we plow through it from the beginning,
through a big pile of material, like the
mouse drilling a hole through it.
And at the other end, we come out,
and that's basically the film.
I hardly ever go back into the footage
that I didn't consider as being worthwhile to
end up in the film.
I do it sometimes.
And sometimes it made my editors nervous that
I was so dismissive of things.
I throw things away at once, and you
have to be ruthless, ruthless with your own
material, because otherwise you end up with a
nine-and-a-half-hour film.
After, let's say, half a year of a
film being out in theaters, I would throw
out all the outtakes forever.
They would be gone.
And my argument is that a carpenter does
not sit on his shavings either.
So you just plow through it, and you
throw away in forever.
You have to take strong decisions.
And sometimes I had to throw out some
of the best I've shot.
In the Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, there was
a six-minute sequence that was incredibly strong,
but it took attention away from the leading
character.
We were so much involved with him.
And then all of a sudden, there's a
detour, and it took you 20 minutes as
an audience to step back into the story
and into the character.
So I decided, throw it out, and it
was thrown out.
So it can be quite painful, but you
have to learn it.
How can you learn to stay away from
endless tweaking, endless fiddling?
You just have to have the nerve.
It's a profession.
It's not raising a pet.
It's not an animal.
It's not a pet.
It's a narrative form of somehow which will
show up at the end on the screen.
And you have to have the nerve, just
be professional.
And you better deliver, and deliver soon.
Heart of Glass, which was under hypnosis, all
actors under hypnosis, very slow pace because of
that.
They move all like movement underwater, and they
speak slowly.
And I showed it to an American distributor,
and they immediately rejected the film.
They said, oh, this is too slow.
And the film is going to go fast.
They said to me like this.
So I said, fine, yes.
But I showed it in Scandinavia, in Norway.
Of all my films, I showed 25 films
in Norway.
And among these films was Heart of Glass,
the slowest of the slow, the strangest of
the strange.
And the Norwegians were bonkers over it.
They went bonkers.
That was the film of films for them,
the pace of the film.
So there's no common denominator worldwide how, for
example, pace of a film should go.
It changes.
The same film is a different film if
you show it in Algeria, or in Brazil,
or in Russia.
All of a sudden, the film changes with
the audience.
But that's the power of cinema that it
completes, complements itself with an audience.
Nobody can really calculate that otherwise studios wouldn't
make such massive mistakes and wouldn't create such
massive flops in between.
And they do a very, very, very precise
market research.
What age group, what kind of subject, what
kind of music?
So there's a whole science about it.
And yet, they have gigantic flops.
If you start to do that, you lose
yourself in the mostly labyrinth of stupidity.
When I show an edited film for the
first time, I would invite, let's say, three,
four people, but they are not trusted confidants.
You see, you would get the yeses and
you will get the applause, but some people
who would not really find it wonderful, everything
that you have done.
My older brother, who is a boss in
the family, he says, I don't want to
do it.
I don't want to have done this kind
of crap again.
And you're just a movie maker.
And so it's all my feet are getting
numb when I see the first two minutes
only.
This kind of echo, for me, has been
of greater value than, let's say, the echo
from a larger test audience.
What is good about a larger test audience
is things, for example, humor.
I do believe that there's a lot of
humor in my films and it seeps through
when you have, let's say, two, three, four
hundred people in an audience and you hear
the ripples from behind of laughter and how
it catches on.
My feeling has always been that Final Cut
quite often doesn't belong to the director.
It doesn't belong to the financiers.
It doesn't belong to the production company or
the network, TV network.
It ultimately belongs to the audience.
And you see it in test screenings.
All of a sudden, everybody finds your ending
way, way, way too long and you better
get back into editing and shorten it.
And it happens, you see, for example, Steven
Spielberg, who always has Final Cut because he's
so successful.
He goes into a test screening and people
find his ending way too long.
You know what?
30 minutes later, he's back in editing and
he trims it down.
However, sometimes you have to ignore it and
they have to be accustomed.
They have to get acquainted to your editing.
And sometimes you just hold a shot way
below what normally anyone else would do.
And it sinks in that there's something special
about the length of a shot.
You have to absorb things right and you
have to take a fresh eye on things.
And of course, since I can rely on
what I have marked down in, for example,
Cave of Forgotten Dreams, there's an end to
it.
Maybe we can show it.
We've discovered by coincidence albino crocodiles.
And I said, this must be in the
film.
It has to do with perspectives, with perception.
We have to have it.
And we filmed it without knowing exactly how
it was going to be connected to the
film.
Crocodiles have been introduced into this brooding jungle
and warmed by water to cool the reactor.
Man, do they thrive.
I invented a pretext.
This crocodile tourist place is heated up with
hot water, which had cooled a nuclear plant
nearby, only half a mile away.
There's a nuclear plant.
They brought in three, four hundred crocodiles.
And all of a sudden I see two
small albino crocodiles.
In fact, they are not even crocodiles.
And you see how they split up in
doppelgängers because it's the same, but with a
water line in the refraction of light.
It's just totally strange and beautiful.
And Peter Zeigling affirmed it in a way
that is just remarkable.
And here I write three exclamation marks.
Minute 13, fourth, 51.
Underwater.
Meeting as if in mirror.
1401.
One exclamation mark.
Left one dives away.
Camera follows.
And it's great and incredible until minute 1537.
Nothing is real.
Nothing is certain.
It is hard to decide whether or not
these creatures here are dividing into their own
doppelgängers.
And do they really meet or is it
just their own imaginary mirror reflection?
And we just take this chunk and that
makes a wonderful end of the film.
Are we today possibly the crocodiles who look
back into an abyss of time when we
see the paintings of Chauvet Cave?