My favorite bits:

MS: Talking of fist-fights, we’re going to skip The Game, which I think is a fantastic film, and talk about Fight Club. Clearly you were reticent to go back to Fox after your Alien 3 experience, but they supported your thing.

DF: But they were all fired, that’s the beauty of it. [audience laughs] Every time somebody comes and says, “You’ve gotta scratch our backs,” I say, “Why? You’re not going to have this job in 11 months. I wanna talk to your assistant.” [audience laughs]

On digital cinematography and his reputation for doing lots of takes:

DF: It’s not the camera. There are certain things that digital doesn’t do well – but it’s more about the workflow to me. It’s about the way that I’m able to make my movie. I like the idea that the first three takes, you’re just rehearsing. I like the fact that actors never have to stop in the middle and watch somebody take $1,000 worth of film out the top of a camera and put another $1,000 worth in. I like the fact that there’s no guilt, you can just delete stuff. If something’s not worth the time that it took for everyone to say it, you can just go beep and it’s gone. So I like the plastic nature of how I’m able to work in digital.

[...] And also, I hate voodoo. I hate the whole thing that you’re going to see seven out of eight takes that are out of focus, and somebody’s going to say, “But that last one’s pretty good.” And you can say, “When you’re directing your movie, you can get one out of eight takes.” No, as a way of working, I prefer having dailies in your lap, rather than waiting to see how much you hate everything you did.

MS: And in terms of takes, you are renown for doing a few.

DF: This is bullshit. Look, you’re spending $150m, unbelievable amounts of money to ship period vehicles from Illinois down to Louisiana and get them working. There are teams of people making these cars work, all this stuff. So you get there and you’re going to shoot three takes and then go home? Why? This is the whole reason we’re here – we’re here to do what’s in front of the camera.

True story.  I was once thrown onto a phone call with David Fincher because I told my new boss that I knew about feature film DI.  He has a reputation for being an asshole, which I think is somewhat unfair, the sense I got is that he just really doesn’t like having his time wasted, and probably 75% of the questions he asked me were for the purposes of determining whether or not I was wasting his time, which, in fairness, I kind of was.

Also, for the record, Christian Bale got a raw deal on the whole “recorded tirade” thing.  It’s obviously up for debate whether or not the DP was the good guy or the bad guy in that particular situation, but I bet lots of people would like to see the sound guy or assistant editor who recorded and leaked that voted off the island.  Totally unprofessional.

Normal people don’t make movies.  Normal people certainly don’t act in movies.  I can barely finish reading a magazine article, much less steer a $150 million movie through production for three years, or wake up every morning, commute to work, spend all day pretending to be a completely different human being while 80 people watch, then go home and resume my life.  You have to be crazy to even be capable of that shit, and you have to be twice as crazy to be good at it.  You want shitty on set tirades?  Spend a day with Michael Bay.

–The President’s great unreleased lines: “I’m a casual admirer of Abraham Lincoln. … [He should have seen] my inaugural: He never drew crowds like that. … [To Senator Lieberman] No hard feelings because of the election. My door is always open. Feel free to drop by ANY SATURDAY AFTERNOON. … [To Gov. Palin] I never expected you to be PALLING AROUND with THIS crowd. I want to congratulate you on your Golden Globe for ‘30 Rock.’ …. [To Vernon Jordan] Just because a guy can give great speeches doesn’t mean he’s going to be a great president. … I see Chief Justice Roberts is here to administer my daily oath of office. … [On the similarity between Cheney and Biden] Dick Cheney is a man of few words. Joe Biden is also vice president. … [On the delay in getting a dog] The labradoodle we picked has some problems with back taxes. … [On ‘a better way for our time’ than blaming each other and passing the buck] I ask you to summon that spirit once more, and make future generations proud of what we did WHEN WE WERE TESTED BY HISTORY.” …

Mike Allen @ Politico via War and Piece

I was checking the weather forecast and noticed a three degree difference in the forecast between Manhattan and Brooklyn for Friday (16 degrees for Brooklyn, 13 degrees for Manhattan). Why is this and why would it be warmer in Brooklyn, isn’t it closer to the ocean? Also, on other days there is no difference or a smaller difference. Any ideas?

— Posted by Mulligan

Actually, Brooklyn’s proximity to the ocean would make it warmer, not colder, for two reasons: a) water changes temperature slowly, thus making coastal cities less susceptible to rapid drops in temperature than mountain cities; and b) sea serpent flatulence.

via curbed

Anyway. it’s funny, and you should add it to your bookmarks, or favorite it, or follow him, or whatever. Maybe twitter it, or twitter about how I blogged about it.

Okay, that last bit was too much, I think we can all agree on that.

I realized that living in New York has honed my roster of rehearsed personal stories by quite a bit, if only because a lot of the questions I’m asked now relate directly to my moving to New York, and I’ve had to tell those stories quite a few times now.

Anyhow. This all struck me quite suddenly during a phone call with my parents, I was talking to my Dad and he asked how my Christmas went. I responded with a perky, “It was good! It was fun!” then proceeded to tell the story of my week in Florida. Then my Mom picked up a line and asked how it went and I repeated the same “It was good! It was fun!”, with enough similarity to the first performance that my Dad actually said, “Well, I’ve heard this already” and hung up.

John McCain went to Iowa yesterday and talked to the editorial board of the Des Moines Register (why we don’t know, that paper is very important for about two months every four years and is otherwise just your garden-variety moon colony fishwrapper).

It will be placed directly between “there is no off position on the genius switch” and “shit like a Swiss train.”

By the way, Wonkette has gotten funny again. It was kind of a waste of time after Ana Marie Cox left, and it may return to being a waste of time after the election, but at the moment it manages to strike a pretty fantastic balance between informative, amusing, and jaded. I’ve begun reading it multiple times a day.