fincher speaks
I’m old enough to remember when there was only one photograph of David Fincher on the internet, and maybe one interview. Now he’s everywhere. Via Defamer, here’s a transcript of a talk he gave at a BFI Screening in England somewhere, where he gets surprisingly frank about lots of interesting stuff.
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.
Finally a funny President
Intentionally funny, I mean:
–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
the future of newspapers
Steve Coll, who wrote one of the more depressing books I’ve run across in recent years, Ghost Wars, lets fly with his theory on the future of print journalism in this piece from the New Yorker. I’ll spoil it for you: Non-Profit.
In the foreseeable future, it seems, there will be two kinds of nonprofit newspapers—those which are deliberately so and those which are reluctantly so. Ever since I left the Washington Post, in 2005—after twenty years there that included a stint in management—and particularly since I joined the nonprofit world at the New America Foundation and started learning about the management and fund-raising issues at tax-exempt organizations, I have been mulling over this idea: that only by turning the Post into a nonprofit trust and raising a university-size endowment to support the newsroom could the paper retain the vitality it requires to serve as a successful watchdog over our constitutional system.
via War and Piece
john hodgman answers the questions of New Yorkers
This is funny. An excerpt:
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.
epic ineptitude
via curbed
It’s 5am
I have two cats laying on my legs, I can’t sleep, I’ve played all of the iPhone games I care to play, and I’m getting bored.
So I’m seeing if the wordpress iPhone app works like it should.
And so this post isn’t a total waste, I’m going to attach some photos from my trip to Darkroom last weekend. Hopefully.
all done
we’ve moved everything over to wordpress, and (for me, at least) the address nurblog.nurble.com resolves to the new fancified wordpress site. I have no idea what will become of the links from the old podcasts, but I can only assume that they will be, to use a technical term, fucked.
Your patience is appreciated.
amusing
I just read 18 pages of Nick Douglas‘ tumblr blog. Do I call it a “tumblr blog” or just a “tumblr”. Maybe it’s in the tumblr FAQ, or they’ll tell me once I start my own tumblr (blog).
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.
You want our money? Well then fuck you
That’s essentially what Bob Reich seems to be saying here. Reich proposes that financial institutions who avail themselves of TARP II funds should be required to sign on to a litany of conditions that (in my limited but ever-increasing experience with banker types) will horrify and outrage their executives.
3. Prohibit any bank that gets TARP II funds from issuing dividends, purchasing other companies, or paying off creditors.
4. Bar any bank that gets TARP II funds from paying its executives, traders, or directors more than 10 percent of what they received in 2007.
5. Require that any bank getting TARP II funds be reimbursed by its executives, traders, and directors 50 percent of whatever amounts they were compensated in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008. This compensation was, after all, based on false premises and fraudulant assertions, and on balance sheets that hid the true extent of these banks’ risks and liabilities.
Personally, I like it. But everything I think I know about the financial crisis came from either This American Life’s credit meltdown series or the bartender at Macao Trading Company in Tribeca. I genuinely thought that having the government purchase stock in banks was the way to go, but Reich disagrees, which I find intriguing. Neither does he think we should be buying toxic assets off of the banks. If I’m reading this right, he thinks we should give money to banks, and banks should sell that money to customers, reopening the credit sluice and bringing profits back, albeit slowly, to the banks themselves.
I know that an open dialogue with my readers isn’t really what goes on here at the nurblog, but if anybody has any insight that doesn’t come from NPR or drunken wall streeters, I’d really appreciate it. Plus we can see if the comment section still works.
on foodies
From Eater:
“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]