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.

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.

ON ‘FOODIES’ —

“For me, the word is a warning that says, ‘Hey, I’m not any fun to have a meal with.’ I’m all for people enjoying the hell out of food, but not if it means they have to give themselves a title to lord over ‘non-foodies.’..I like the olden days when people who enjoyed food the most were simply called overweight.” [Fat City via EMD]

I just want to write useless shit that nobody reads, not fuck around with FTP software all night.

So we’re going to try Wordpress. I’m literally installing it as I type this, so no need to go looking for the URL just yet. When its semi up and running, I’ll be sure to let you all know.

Oops, Transmit says it’s done uploading! Time to leap into PHP hell for a while!

Some goals:

1) Twitter postings in the sidebar that don’t look lame

2) Direct and better access to nurblecasts. Nurblecasts playable directly from the blog.

3) better automation of nurblecast features. tags for artists. make the playlists more useful.

4) more options for posting from ye olde iPhone.

5) locate and re-link some of the old photos that got lost when I upgraded my blogger version.

6) fix formatting on old posts.

7) find non-retarded template to use with shiny new MT blog.

8) blog more often, about more interesting shit, and try to make visiting this blog a worthwhile use of people’s time.*

If you’d like to see how it’s going, the new blog can be found here.

*obviously this post, being on the old blog as it is, does not conform to these new standards.

Somehow I got roped into making a family photo album for the girlfriend, so now I’m spending a lovely Christmas evening in bed with a pair of laptops learning Movable Type on the fly and trying to figure out why we can’t just use flickr like everybody else.

Oh, and if you’ve never tried to upload data at a respectable speed from a Marriott outside Orlando, don’t. I’m getting about 100k/s, which is only slightly faster than writing it on a napkin and mailing it to the hosting provider.

That’s not to say that I cook well, I don’t. Fuckups are frequent, and this is why I solicited advice, scoured the internet, and actually practiced the recipe earlier in the week before deploying it on my friends.

Most of the recipe is from this site, helpfully titled “the Worlds Best Mac and Cheese“. I like it not just because it’s based on a recipe from James Beard, or because it involves a roux, which I’d never done before but might be the secret to deliciousness in all things, but because it’s by someone named Patrick Fitzgerald, and I can pretend that in between indicting Scooter Libby and Rob Blagojevich, Fitz took a moment to do some chefery.

I’d assumed that there had been a drop, but I had no idea it was that sharp or deep. The repercussions of such a drop-off are also surprising. Suck it, Iran.

Weird.