Balance 09: Excelente diálogo con seis grandes cineastas

The Hollywood Reporter reunió a James Cameron (Avatar), Peter Jackson (Desde mi cielo / The Lovely Bones), Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker), Lee Daniels (Precious), Jason Reitman (Amor sin escalas / Up in the Air) y Quentin Tarantino (Bastardos sin gloria). Una charla imperdible.

A continuación transcribimos el diálogo completo (en inglés) publicado por The Hollywood Reporter:

The Hollywood Reporter: Do you guys consider yourselves outsiders or insiders?

Jason Reitman: Dead silence. (Laughs.)

James Cameron: If we're all outsiders, who's on the inside?

Quentin Tarantino: Well, actually, that's a very interesting question to start off with because I did my first movie in '92, so this was the year I actually counted how long I've been in the business. Officially as a director, that's 17 years, and I think for the first 10 years I did consider myself an outsider. But if you last this long and you're not just doing marginal work -- which could be great work -- but you're not just doing marginal work for the people who like your stuff at film festivals, then I guess you actually kind of are in the inside. I remember going to the Governors Ball dinner and actually feeling like I was part of the room -- that these are my people.

Peter Jackson: I guess I'm the guy with the geographical situation, living in New Zealand. So I definitely feel like an outsider. Like, in New Zealand, we don't film ourselves having breakfast. It just never happens.

Reitman: I've done this every day of my entire life. (Laughs.) My father set up a camera.

Jackson: To me, this is an alien culture. Hollywood is the other side of the world and it's another planet.

THR: Even though you directed one of the most well-received trilogies in film history.

Jackson: I'm not really thinking about filmmaking as such. I'm thinking about the culture of Hollywood and the business. We're so far removed from it, which I like. I'll be staying down there, having my breakfast in peace and quiet.

Cameron: I'd like to answer his question for him. You're an outsider by process but you're an insider by the types of films that you make. You love the big spectacle films.

Jackson: Yeah, sure I do.

Cameron: And I think I'm probably the same in the sense that I like to make films for the mainstream, for the global audience. I'm not interested in making a film for film festival crowds. I'd just as soon not meet people and talk about the movie. And I don't mean that in some disdainful way, it's just the movie should be the movie. But I don't consider myself a Hollywood insider in the sense that, well, first of all, I didn't have an agent for 15 years and don't have a manager, don't have a publicist, I just like to live quietly and stay out of the public view as much as possible. I don't go to parties, don't do lunches, don't do dinners, I just like to hang with the fam when I have free time. So I guess that's an outsider by process and insider by result, maybe.

Kathryn Bigelow: I think of it as a community that's very pourous. I don't think of it in a bifurcated way. There's a ton of mobility and it's really all based on the content, the idea. If your idea is strong enough, you're embraced. Otherwise you're marginalized. I think it's really a merit-based, very porous, elastic community.

Reitman: I somehow grew up inside without ever feeling inside, and by the time I was trying to be a director I felt completely outside. I was told my entire life that nepotism was going to pave the way for my career -- and no one wanted to make my first film. I had "Thank You for Smoking" written for five, six years and no one would finance it. Nepotism failed me. My first film was financed by a San Francisco Internet millionaire, one of the guys that created PayPal, and my entire career has been film festivals. It was the independent directors -- I remember lining up to see "Pulp Fiction" in Westwood -- and it was directors like Quentin and reading Robert Rodriguez's book. I remember telling Kevin Smith, "You're one of the reasons I became a director," and Kevin said, "You were on the set of 'Ghostbusters,' I'm the reason you wanted to become a director?' " (Laughs.)

Jackson: So every time we use eBay and PayPal are we still paying off your first film?

Reitman: Those comic books you bought helped pay --

Lee Daniels: I feel like an outsider, and even the films I've produced have been done in Harlem and I only come here to cast. I never felt embraced.

THR: But what about the strong response in Hollywood to "Precious"?

Daniels: It's really nice. Now I feel sort of embraced. I feel this weird, sort of, "Am I part of (Hollywood)? Oh my God, I guess I am. I don't know.

THR: Kathryn, you've seen filmmaking from inside and outside the system, correct?

Bigelow: Actually, all my films have been independent. So even though some people think they're studio films, they were only studio at the end of the day when we had a distributor.

Tarantino: Talking about seeing films at a film festival, I saw "The Loveless" during its one screening at FilmX, all right.

Bigelow: That was '82

Tarantino: It was '82 and you know why I saw it? Because I was a huge fan of Robert Gordon. It was like, "Oh, wow, the Rockabilly singer is in a movie? Cool!" It was just one screening of "The Loveless."

Bigelow: And that was it. (Laughs.)

THR: Jim, you mentioned wanting to make films for the big global audience. But it's getting more expensive to produce those kinds of films. How much is money now a factor in the creative decisions you're making?

Cameron: Money is always a factor at any scale of film production, and sometimes smaller films are much harder to finance than bigger films. In fact, I would say almost always smaller films (are harder). It took me two years to put together the financing for a $20 million film ("Sanctum") that we're doing down in Australia right now, and it took almost no time at all to put together "Avatar" -- at least to get "Avatar" rolling in the sense that the studio was funding preproduction to develop the look; they still had a bail-out (opportunity) at a certain point if they didn't want to go forward. It was easier to get that process going because of my history with Fox, but doing an independent film, it's much harder putting the money together, and you've got to really, really do exactly what you say you are going to do. There's no room for experimentation and there would be no way to make a movie like "Avatar" under those constraints because there's too much R&D involved, there are too many variables going into it.

THR: Do you end up underestimating what you think the budget will be in order to get financiers interested or overestimating so there are no surprises later?

Daniels: Go on the low side and then ask for extra later, once they like it.

Reitman: I've always wanted my movies to be as cheap as possible so I have as much control as possible. My first two films cost $6 million and $7 million each and this one cost $25 million and that freaked me out a little because I thought I'd be giving up control, to a certain extent. I almost wanted to try and pull it back, but with the amount of cities we were shooting, it was impossible.

Cameron: It didn't go any farther than the $6 million or $7 million, though, did it? When you make a movie for $20 million, you feel like you don't have any more money than when you were doing it for $6 million.

Reitman: Yeah, you know, you're absolutely right. It wasn't all of a sudden as though we had luxuries on set. It was the same.

Tarantino: I want my movies to cost as little as they possibly can so they have to make back as little. The pressure is less and I want my stock to stay good. As far as cost and what we get back, track record is not bad. The last three movies I've been wrong by $6 million or $7 million but I'm always trying to do it for $30 million or something and it turns out to be $38 million.

THR: That doesn't get you into trouble?

Tarantino: The only time I ever had a situation like that -- and it worked out fantastic -- was on "Kill Bill" because we were trying to do some action sequences that really had never been done before. I was trying to do them Hong Kong-style, not the American style of shooting, and -- these guys can tell you -- to do some of the best action you're ever going to see, it takes time. It just takes time. You need to be there. It takes days. And you don't know you're done until you're done. You can try and put it on a schedule, but if you ain't done you ain't fucking done! If it's not getting you off, it ain't done, so that means it just takes time. You can make up time with story points but on the action it's going to take it's own rhythm.

Cameron: Don't get worked up about it. I've been wrong by more than that entire budget. (Laughs.)

Reitman: That's the line of the morning.

Tarantino: We literally had a situation where it was like this runaway train because "Kill Bill" was actually costing drastically more than what we said it was going to (cost). While we were in China, Harvey (Weinstein) went down to the editing room and my editor had to show him an assembly of some of the stuff we had done and Harvey had to decide: Do I go forward with them or do we pull the plug or do we put a big leash on him, what's the deal? And after he saw the footage, he liked it so much he called me up and said, "Quentin, just go make your movie."

Reitman: And then you got two movies!

Tarantino: It worked out really good.

THR: Quentin, at the producers roundtable, Lawrence Bender mentioned that for "Inglourious Basterds" you funded development and some preproduction yourself. Why?

Tarantino: Oh, that was easy to do. I know my movies are going to get made, so that's not an issue for me. But I don't like to make a deal unless everything is completely -- I want my deal to be good, so I don't make it under any situation where I am in a negative place. And I knew we needed to get going right away, so I just financed everything until we made our deal. I didn't want to have to make a deal in order to do some cockamamie bullshit. I know it's gonna get made so it's not a big thing.

Jackson: It's the same here. We always find that it's easier if you fund your script development yourself, you don't take a fee for the script.

Tarantino: I completely agree with that.

Jackson: "The Lovely Bones," which we've just done, we paid for the rights to the book ourselves, we wrote the check, we developed it ourselves. If we're doing conceptual art, we pay for that ourselves. We only ever go to a studio when we have a complete package and know the budget. It comes down to people. It comes down to you and somebody else (at the studio) on the other end of the phone that you're talking to, and I think that transparency counts for a lot. Honesty and transparency, and then if you do get into the situation where you're going $6 million over or whatever it is, everybody can see it happening way in advance -- you're not hiding it -- and people can make very rational decisions. The only conflicts we have are procedural ones. Like the process we always insist on now with making films is we always build into our budget a pickup shoot in postproduction. Because I feel once you've shot the movie and you've cut the movie, you want to do another three weeks of shooting. You're just going to want to because there are ways of making the film better. Studios will always say, "Don't put that in the budget, we don't want that in the budget, if you want to do that come and see us, we'll decide," and I never trust that, so we always insist that our pickup shoots are part of the budget. That's the argument we always have, but on the other hand we usually win that argument because it's common sense and we shop (the project) to different studios and we go with the one that agrees to allow us to do that. But honestly you're dealing with a person, you're not dealing with a faceless corporation, you're dealing with other human beings and having a relationship with those people is very, very important.

Bigelow: I think that transparency is really important. On "Hurt Locker," I had to convince people that shooting in the Middle East was going to be all right and nobody was going to be killed, so I went over there, financed it myself and did the scout, came back with all the materials and the locations and met with the Royal Family (of Jordan). I don't think anyone would have taken a flier unless that initial leap had been done.

Cameron: You have to do your due diligence so that (the studio) can do theirs. They're responsible to their boss and to a board or whatever it is. They're going to have to do the due diligence on your project, (figure out) that you're not going to go psycho, you're not going to go out of control, that it makes sense, that the film that you're making makes sense at the budget that you're making it at.

Jackson: From a dealmaking point of view, where you lose ground a lot is if you do the deal to make the movie too early ... and (there are) a whole bunch of things you haven't thought of. Then suddenly you have to ask for things, they chip away at your deal, and they want things in return. So it's better to spend your own money and get things sorted out. Then it's pretty straightforward.

THR: Lee, did you have money problems getting "Precious" made?

Daniels: I went over budget on my film because the financier -- I had just finished producing a film for her and she's like, "OK, what do you want to do next?" And I said, "I want to direct a movie about a 400-pound black girl," and she said, "OK." I said, "What? What?" So I rushed into production without really thinking about the crew that I normally work with because they were all scattered. I was so shocked that I started hiring people without really doing the due diligence. Then, as I was two weeks into production, I hated everyone, there was no one I had worked with, they weren't responding, they didn't get the story, they didn't get me, and I had to go back to the investors and say, "Listen, guys, I have to shut down production and reshoot most of this."

Cameron: That's a tough conversation.

THR: You did that face to face?

Daniels: I did, and it was really a great thing. They really believed in me and it was beautiful that they did.

Cameron: I'm gonna try that next time.

Tarantino: Good for you. Good for you for (saying), "You know what, this isn't working and I can't tell my story with these people," as opposed to just persevering and making the best out of a bad situation. Good for you because you wouldn't have that movie that you have now if you had worked under those situations.

Jackson: You've got to rely on your instincts. There are always those moments that come when you just want to go the easy way out but your gut is screaming that you've got to make those changes and you've got to follow your instincts. You've got to do it and it's always the hard road. You ignore that at your peril.

Tarantino: If you really love your project you have to make some choices from time to time that risk it going away. You actually have to risk killing your baby if your baby is going to grow up the way you want it to.

Cameron: To make the movie in any way that you will want to put your name on it, from the very first conversation you have to be willing to walk out the door. Only by being willing to walk away from it can you have the strength to make the film the right way. The first time you cave, it's just a series of caves.

Tarantino: You get no respect for it, either.

THR: Tell us about one particular moment where you had to do that.

Cameron: That started for me pretty early on. I was four or five days from starting to shoot "The Terminator" and I was meeting with (producer) John Daly -- may he rest in peace -- and he said, "I don't really understand this story about this guy that comes from another planet and we need to have a story conference." And actually it was (writer-producer) Gale (Anne Hurd) that had the balls; she stood up and said, "That's ridiculous. We're four days from shooting." (She) walked out and I was like, "What she said!" (Laughs.)

THR: Was there a point where you almost walked away from "Avatar"?

Cameron: Well, you know, "Avatar" is a little bit different because I talked these guys (at Fox) into writing this big check and if I'd walked out, that would have been just too irresponsible. No matter what went wrong on the shoot, we had to figure it out. I told them, "No, it's going to be fine, we've got this all worked out," (then, aside), "Guys, do we have this worked out yet?" And we didn't.

THR: What are specific sacrifices you're willing to make to maintain final cut?

Reitman: Less money. At the end of the day, I feel like there are many versions of the same movie that can be made. I'll just take mine, for example. There's a version of "Up in the Air" that can be made for $500,000 and there's a version that can be made for $100 million. I would do it for as little as possible to make sure that I still had complete control. I remember the big question: We had George Clooney but there was a question about Vera Farmiga early on, and I was getting pressure because I had written a great women's role that there was a lot of interest in, and I wrote it for Vera. I just believed in her. I remember seeing her in "Down to the Bone" at Sundance and thinking she was spectacular. I thought she was amazing in "The Departed." I had met with her and I just knew she was the one. She was going to have a baby two weeks before we started shooting and because of that there was this additional amount of pressure of, "Look, she's going to have a baby two weeks before she starts, and by the way, this actress and this actress, they would love to come and play across George." And there was just no fucking way.

Daniels: There are a couple films that I've been offered that I love (but) I ended up taking a film that I love more because they offered me final cut. The payday is not there but I have final cut so that's important.

Cameron: I've had final cut for a long time and I've never invoked it.

Daniels: Really?

Cameron: Because I've always believed that the people paying the price, writing the check, have an opinion and we need to work this out and we need to be partners. If they feel strongly about something --

Tarantino: But that's a great loaded gun to have in your holster.

Cameron: Better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it.

Reitman: Once you have final cut, you actually don't get into those conversations. I find it becomes much more relaxed. I had it for the first time on this film and this time I never had to say, "Well, by the way, I have final cut," because wow! We're having such a reasonable conversation. They supported you throughout, right?

Daniels: They completely supported me.

Reitman: So it's not as though you felt, "Thank God, I have this gun in my pocket."

Bigelow: I didn't have to invoke it on "Hurt Locker."

Reitman: They must have been scared of you after seeing your film!

Tarantino: Actually, the thing to me that is more of a dealbreaker than final cut -- because I've had final cut for a long time, I can't imagine not having it now -- is the whole market research process. I have in my deal: I don't do that. I have one screening with an audience -- no cards, no focus group, I just watch the movie with the audience, me and (editor) Sally (Menke), we see how they react. Two weeks later, locked cut.

Reitman: Wait, didn't you show ("Basterds") at Cannes and make adjustments after that?

Tarantino: Yeah, but that's not a market research screening, that's a screening at the Palais.

Reitman: You should have handed out cards at the Palais. (Laughs.)

Tarantino: I always do something after that market research screening but I don't care about the audience's opinion individually. I don't care about the cards.

Cameron: It's the vibe in the room.

Tarantino: It's the vibe in the room. Look, you know when your movie plays well and when it doesn't, and what'll happen oftentimes is a movie totally plays well, everyone's happy and then the cards contradict exactly what you watched happen in the room.

Daniels: What do you think when that happens? Because that's happened to me.

Tarantino: I think people get holier than thou when they get these cards. They take the high road. If you're doing genre shit, then you're really in trouble.

Jackson: I also think the problem is the interpretation of the cards. The difficulty is that somebody sees the result on a card and they think it's because of this, but the real reason why people are responding is because of a combination of six other things. So there's a skill in actually knowing how to interpret (the feedback) and the danger is not so much the fact that you're showing it and getting feedback but in how people interpret that feedback. Somebody could say, "I didn't like this because this guy got killed," but it could (have) nothing to do with that, in reality. It's psychological.

Cameron: As long as the filmmaker is in charge of the market research process. That's the way it needs to work. You can have audiences saying things that are kind of a gestalt effect over the course of a film and the second the studio asks you to take this out because somebody didn't like it in that moment, they're not thinking about the effect it might have six scenes later and how something that they loved and that plays beautifully now won't play. They don't think holistically, and the problem with the cards is it gives the studio guys ammunition for specific agendas that they've had all along. They've got a hard-on for this scene or they've got a hard-on for this scene and all they've got to have is one card they can point to that doesn't like the scene and suddenly they're right.

Bigelow (to Cameron): On "Blue Steel" -- I don't know if you remember this -- somebody in the focus group said they didn't like Ron Silver -- and he's the bad guy. They were like, "Reshoot it!"

THR: What did you do?

Bigelow: I just held firm.

Jackson: Final cut is one thing but there's also casting approvals, script approvals are very important, there is a whole range of approvals. Final cut is just one thing. With most of the people at this table, if you're originating a project and you're not reading other people's scripts, if you're actually originating the thing from the very beginning, then to me it's a natural that you've got to have control over everything from the very beginning. Because it starts in your brain; that's where it comes from.

Cameron: I was just thinking to myself, "How long does it take a discussion of directors sitting around a table to devolve to kvetching about the studios? Four minutes?" (Laughs.)

Reitman: It's a weird thing. I've been around directors my entire life. I grew up the son of a director, so I've been kind of conscious of this for a long time: There are very few people who understand how to direct. It's one of the most complex things. It's impossible to explain. All of us have done so many panels and sat through so many interviews where you're asked, "Why did you do this? How did you do that?" Process questions. You would never ask a musician why they play notes. It is an impossible thing to explain why a scene here will make the audience feel this way so by the time they get here they will feel this (way and) that will make the ending whole. There is no way to describe why a scene is important or why it works. We want our audience to feel a certain way and instinctually, through trial and error, we have found the way. If I do this and this and this and I make these thousand decisions right every day, they will simply feel this feeling as they walk out of the theater.

Cameron: It's trust in your instincts.

Reitman: There are maybe a few hundred people on Earth who understand that, yet there are tens of thousands of people telling those few hundred how to do it better. (Laughs.)

Cameron: I was having this conversation with myself coming over here about instinct. Because every filmmaker says it's instinct. It is instinct, instinct informed by an extremely analytical process. And usually what happens is you have an analysis that's Byzantine that connects down to a moment where it's a flip of the coin -- and then it's instinct. But the important thing is once you've made that instinctive decision you shouldn't have to justify it because you're getting paid to have that filter. You've proven you have that filter and you're getting paid now for that filter.

Reitman: But you have to learn how to justify it. That becomes part of the job, frighteningly enough.

Cameron: I've found that big-budget movies are a curse and a blessing. You can do amazing things, you can do amazing visuals, you get that big machine all warmed up and you're turning out spectacular stuff. But you're playing a different game. You're playing a game where all those controls that you can have as an auteur on a smaller scale, you don't have any more. You have them but you don't have them, because you have to be very realistic about the fact that you are now spending so much of the studio's money it shows up on the radar of their annual budget, so they are your partners and you've got to bring them along by the hand, they've got to understand why you're doing things. The better you can elucidate why you're doing something -- even if you're doing it instinctively -- if you can analyze and elucidate your instinctive call and give it some form, give it some wordplay, it just works better for them. If you go, "I just feel that way, damnit!" It freaks them out.

Bigelow: You're sharing ownership.

Tarantino: Let me ask you a question, though. That brings up something that's interesting. You are in a situation where you're making the movies you want to make but they cost a whole lot so you have to be responsible for that. So in that scenario -- I'm going to use the Laser Disc example because I'm assuming it's on DVD but I know it's on Laser Disc -- there is the version of "The Abyss" that played theatrically and then there was your big Laser Disc version. Which do you consider your movie?

Cameron: This is interesting. I was led astray by the market research process. I was not savvy. I had never done it before. We didn't do it on "Aliens," didn't do it on "Terminator." We just finished the film, put it in theaters, no bullshit, no screening, nothing.

Reitman: Shut up.

Cameron: I showed it to the studio but we didn't have time to do a screening on "Aliens." So, the first time I did it was on "The Abyss," and I misinterpreted the cards because I didn't know how to operate the process. And we showed it to an audience in Texas, two screenings back to back. One with the wave scene at the end, and one without. And they hated both versions! (Laughs.) So I said, "Well, at least make it short." So, to answer your question, I like the wave version better when we finished the visual effects on it and it worked.

Tarantino: It's funny. You immediately go to the wave thing. I'm thinking about all the camaraderie stuff you have with the guys at the very beginning. When I saw the big version, I thought, this is so wonderful! This is really bringing it together.

Cameron: Well, look, I learned some lessons from that. I learned: One, the filmmaker's got to be in charge of the market research process and not let other people interpret the cards for you. You've got to sit with the cards in some kind of Zen state and try to first of all get past the egregious handwriting. (Laughs.) You've got to look at the author: 12-year-old male. You've got to get patterns. And the patterns are like going through the chicken guts. You become a shaman.

Reitman: You're like a psychologist. Why does someone say something? This is a metaphor for everything in the directorial process. You realize that you didn't know enough about that part of filmmaking and you realize you have to become an expert in each element or have someone that you trust implicitly that may as well be attached to you, part of your DNA. You have to become a producer, you have to become a writer, you have to understand all these jobs.

THR: What's the toughest scene to film?

Daniels: There was a dance scene, a party scene in "Precious" where Precious got her award. And it didn't feel like a party to me. It didn't feel real, it didn't feel honest. I fixed it to my liking in post where I actually went into parties and the environment and actually put a mike around and brought words and sentences and phrases into the scene to make it honest.

Tarantino: The scenes that always give me trepidation leading up to them are the big cinematic scenes, big action scenes. Because I don't want to be a piker. I want them to be awesome, all right. So if I'm doing the car chase in "Death Proof" I want it to be one of the greatest car chases of all time. But I've never shot a car chase before. Part of it, if you haven't done it before, is you're gonna learn how to do it as you do it. You gotta know, I'm not going to know exactly how to do it on the first day, but I'll figure it out over the course of it and that's going to be cool. But there's trepidation leading up to it because I want it to be great and I want it to be awesome and it's mine to eff up. I always look at it -- like, the fire scene, say, in "Basterds" or the fight sequences in "Kill Bill" -- and it's like, I think I'm pretty good, so I want them to be magnificent. And if they're not, then I've officially reached the ceiling of my talent.

Cameron: Don't worry, you'll work again.

Tarantino: I always want to risk bumping my head. I want to see where that ceiling eventually happens.

Bigelow: Shooting in a Palestinian refugee camp, there was a lot of trepidation. Everybody said, "That can't be done." We had Americans running around in digitals shooting M4s at 3 o'clock in the morning. There was a lot of anxiety about it. We had a little extra security. (But) I was determined to shoot there, architecturally it was perfect and you know what it's like when you get it in your head, this is where you want to shoot. So we went in there, shot the sequence, and at about 2 o'clock in the morning a camp elder -- there was a little disruption at the beginning, a little friction, a few riots, very small -- but a camp elder came out and gave me tea. So I knew we were going to be all right. But we hadn't done the gunfire. So at about 4:30 in the morning -- now, this is a Palestinian refugee camp, and we're running around shooting their M4s and I'm thinking the place will explode. Not even a bathroom light goes on. (Laughs.)

Cameron: They could hear it wasn't an AK-47 so they went back (to sleep).

Bigelow: Another night, another M4.

Reitman: "Really, the M4s are starting at 4:30 this morning? Oh ..."

Jackson: I like shooting a lot of big stuff and I'm not really so worried about that. If I wake up in the morning and say, "Oh, I've got to go shoot that bloody scene," it's usually sitting around the dinner table talking. With all the eyelines. The worst example was on the first "Lord of the Rings" movie, we had this thing called the Council of Elrond where the group of characters all had to sit in a circle of chairs. There were about 12 leading characters and eight pages of dialogue with people in these chairs. One person talks to this guy, then this guy talks and he's got to swivel his head. And I had to get all the eyelines right. It took me about five days to shoot that and it was torture. It was hell on earth and it was the most simple scene in the world. I didn't do anything fancy. Those are the scenes where I don't have fun and I don't particularly enjoy what I'm doing.

Cameron: Group scenes are difficult, I always dreaded them. Shooting under water is difficult. Doing big action, shooting a lot of extras. All those things are difficult. But if we define "hard" as the thing we're most anxious about, then for me, it's times when I'm going for something that is a little bit cinematically vague and stylized. I'm trying to do something that I haven't done before, I'm trying to give the audience a feeling through the use of camera, and I'm looking for something and I don't know what it is. You can take the most complicated, big action sequence and you can break it down, storyboard it and deconstruct it down to its components, and you've always got a map. But if you're there with some extras and you're trying to do something odd -- like the actor is dying and you're trying to put the audience in their head to see what they're seeing, and you don't know, are you going to do it with lighting? Are you going to do it with some kind of lens effect?

Jackson: I've just done an entire film like that! And it was hell on earth, but carry on ...

Cameron: When you're going for some kind of cinematic trope, you see other people do it but it never applies. You can't take their idea.

Jackson: One thing that helps me with those scenes is to play music on the set. Do you do that?

Daniels: I do. To get me in the mood.

Jackson: It depends a little on the dialogue but I'm happy to loop a lot of the dialogue later. If it helps the actor who has to get into the state of mind you're describing, I'm very happy to have music playing on speakers.

Cameron: (Jackson) said he did it in an interview and I went, "That's a good idea," so I did it.

Tarantino: I actually have music playing in between takes. My sound guy has a bunch of songs, we're always playing music as the crew is getting ready for the next take. For instance, (in "Basterds") that whole thing with David Bowie's "Cat People", as she's putting on her shit, I played "Cat People" every time we did all that stuff. And actually Melanie (Laurent) is really musical so she really got into the rhythm. The whole crew gets into the rhythm. If you're using music and you're kinda doing it like it's gonna be in the movie, that's the stuff that the crew actually feels like they're watching the movie. It's not just a separate piece. They all get their dick hard, they all go, "Oh, this is gonna be awesome!"

Bigelow: I never have any time in between takes. I'm always shooting. I can't imagine that. I want that schedule.

THR: Jason, you were shooting in airports, so --

Reitman: Oh, there was music, we just couldn't turn it off. (Laughs.) I got so close to ripping a speaker out of the ceiling. It's one of those moments where you realize you've done everything you can, you have hundreds of people on the set, you've spent the money, you've done the right prep work, your lights are there, and you're in an airport so you've dealt with 12 different security departments, and then all of a sudden, you're about to do a take, and there's this twinkling coming from the speaker above your head. And you realize there's one human being who controls this Phil Collins song, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Cameron: You're in his world now.

Reitman: Exactly. And that the moment where you go, "OK, I guess I can be one of two directors. I can be the director who literally reaches up in the ceiling, rips the speaker from the panel." That's one director. Or I'm just gonna sit here and we're going to think about looping it. Actually, someone found a way to unplug the speakers. But that speaks to another element that's important to directing, which is: every time you go to direct something, you're doing something that no one has ever done for the first time. It's part of the reason that all of us got excited about directing in the first place. But it makes every day shooting insane. But if you were doing something that someone had done before, then it would be boring, there would be no reason to do it.

THR: Do you guys believe there is such a thing as a director's personality?

Reitman: I used to think that. But then I started meeting directors and they completely run the gamut. I've had conversations with Spike Jonze, who is so quiet and uncomfortable, and I've talked to Quentin, for example. (Laughs.) They're all storytellers. I think there's perhaps a confidence and arrogance in knowing we have something to say but the way that each one goes about it seems to be very different.

Tarantino: You would think being a leader is one of those ingredients, but it often isn't. You would think being decisive would be one of those ingredients, and it often isn't. (Laughs.)

Cameron: Is there a good director's personality? I'd say decisiveness might be required.

Jackson: If you're not decisive, you've got to pretend you are.

Tarantino: It doesn't have to be the right decision, it just has to be a decision.

Cameron: It's binary. Everybody comes to you for the decision and you're the decision mechanism.

Jackson: At the beginning of the day when I walk on set and privately I'm thinking, "What the hell am I gonna do?" and I go on set and I say as decisively as I can, "OK, let's get the actors, let's do the blocking, and we'll do this, this and this, and then we block it a few times," and I'm desperately trying to cover and not let anyone know that I don't have a clue. By the time you've blocked it a few times, you've got a plan and everything's OK. But (there's) that first 10 minutes on set where you've got to fake it and you don't really know what you're doing.

Cameron: It's critical to create an environment among the crew and the actors that allows for the fluidity to find the thing you're there to do. And be honest about it. "All right, guys, I don't know what the hell we're doing. Let's do this, go over there, that's good." There's a finite amount of time you can fuck around but be honest about the fact that you don't know exactly how it's gonna work. That puts the ball in the actors' camp.

Jackson: I always think it's great to have the actors run a scene, not at full performance pitch, but simply half-energy, run the scene a few times and I just walk around in circles. I just circle, looking for interesting little lineups, little accidents, where things pop into nice compositions, and you slowly just get your shot list together.

Reitman: When was your first movie where you were confident enough to do that? My first movie, "Thank You for Smoking," I had everything planned out, and I was terrified to show up at set not knowing what to do. And "Juno," I was more confident, but this was the first time where I would show up on set and feel like it's OK that I don't know what I'm going to do because I'm confident in myself, I'm confident I have the right people and we're going to find it.

Cameron: On "Terminator," which was really my first film because I got fired after a few days on what is supposedly my first film, I mapped it all out, I storyboarded everything, I was super prepared, I had my roommate at the time, Bill Wisher, who was another writer, I got a camera and took pictures of him acting out every moment of the film. In wardrobe. And from those I drew everything out. I was super, super prepared. Now I've never done that since. That gave me my confidence to come in and say, "Camera goes here, stand there." You know what I mean?

Reitman: So by "Aliens" you were willing to show up and go, "You know what, today I don't know what we're doing."

Cameron: No, I'd show up with a Viewfinder and I'd look around the set and I'd figure it out. I didn't try to preimpose my architecture. I wanted the place to talk to me.

Bigelow: I have to physicalize it. I have to get out there in the location, not hypothetically, and look at the actors.

Reitman: And see what happens when people talk to each other. Or shoot each other. (Laughs.)

Bigelow: In this environment, that's going to dictate if you're going to go from A to B and your set's maybe 300 meters long, that's going to dictate. You're not going to be able to do it at a table read.

Jackson: Storyboards and your shot list are almost like a fallback position. If you can't think of anything else, you've got that to fall back on.

Cameron: Storyboarding is the act of removing possibility before you have enough information to remove it. That's why I don't believe in it. I don't do it.
Tarantino: I don't do it, either. One of the things that's interesting, though, is there's another artistic reason for everything we're talking about, and that is: Look, I don't do storyboards, from time to time I'll do shot lists, just to shoot it for free, basically. If I need some weird piece of equipment, I figure it out that way. Then I leave them at home and show up and make it up. One of my big reasons for doing that is, look, I've written the scene, rehearsed the scene, maybe -- or not -- and maybe I know what I wanted when I wrote it. But now we're shooting the scene and it's Tuesday. Tuesday's got to play into this artistic process. How you feel today, the day you're shooting the scene, how you feel driving into work today, if something fucking happened that changed shit yesterday and now you have a different feeling, now the actors have a different feeling. That's what we're here to do, capture these feelings on these days. It's got to be a living, breathing organism.

THR: Would it bother any of you if the studios thought of you as a "difficult" director?

Reitman: James?

Daniels: James?

Cameron: I was waiting for that. (Laughs.) It would bother me, one, if it were true. And, two, if my cast thought that. I don't care what the media thinks because they're not standing on my sets seeing what goes on. It would bother me a lot if my cast thought that. Hasn't happened yet, so --

Tarantino: That probably would bother me. But what does that even mean? If my crew feels that way ... well, they don't. They have a great time. You tend to work with the same people, but then that's a weird thing too because after a certain point you don't want to get too comfortable, all right, so that's something you've got to be careful about. That's the way directors tend to go, the older they get. I'm still in that place. I want to people who know me and know what I want, but at some point there needs to be new people added to that thing or you just ...

Daniels: What defines "difficult"? Difficult is knowing what you want and not leaving until you get it?

Reitman: That's directing. Every actor I do a Q&A with says, "Well, Jason knows what he wants." And it half sounds like an insult but half is like, "Yes, that's my job."

Daniels: Often times that is perceived as difficult.

Tarantino: When I think "difficult" I think, you're trying to cut your movie and you're fighting with the studio about it. And you're not letting them in on the process.

Bigelow: It's a collaborative process. And I try to keep it as collaborative as possible.

Reitman: I'd rather be difficult than lost. I'd rather my actor say, "Well, he keeps on coming at me until I give him what he needs," than, "He doesn't seem to know what the hell he wants or what he's doing."

Daniels: There's a scene in "Precious" where Mo'Nique is dancing with a leotard on and it made no sense at all. She was like, "Why am I dancing here?" And I said, "Just because. Just do it." She couldn't figure it out. Then she succumbed and she did it and it just, sort of, was. It was a moment.

Bigelow: It's trust, more than anything else.

Cameron: You've got to explore stuff even if you don't exactly know why. You're the only person on set that can do that. An actor can go after something but really they're going to ultimately be judged by the editor or the director. But the director is the only one that can get a scent and go after it. I think the most important thing, I've found, is to give yourself the freedom, at least within boundaries, to do that. To go off the map, to go off the plan. It's the hardest thing to do. OK, we briefed on this, this is what we said we were going to do today but we're shooting this direction.

Tarantino: One of the most exciting times on a set, though, is if it's your last day on a location, and you know you probably need about 35 shots to get it off and you don't think you're going to get those 35 shots and you're freaking out the next night, and you come up with a way, at midnight, after everyone's gone, to do it all in one shot. So you can get out of there. And you show up the next day and you're like, "Guys, guess what?" Not only are we not going to do those 35 shots that we know we can't do, this is gonna be a one-er. That's exciting. That's filmmaking. The cinematographer freaks out, but that's his fucking job.

THR: Over the past few years studios have begun questioning the value of casting star actors. Do you agree?

Bigelow: You cast not for marquee value but for performance and talent. The right actor for the part. Anything else is a compromise.

Daniels: I like working with friends that I'm comfortable with that know my DNA and also fit the character descriptions. I'd rather work with someone I know personally than a mega-star or a really talented, brilliant actor.

Reitman: George (Clooney) made my movie so much easier to make. And most importantly he was perfect for the part. But there was just as much interest in Ellen Page playing Juno as there has been in George playing Ryan Bingham in "Up in the Air." So it was a blessing to get the movie made, but once we were making it, he was perfect for it, and now that we're actually putting it out there, I've found that there's just as much excitement about what he's bringing to the role as there was about this young girl who's playing Juno.

Bigelow: I found the same thing with Jeremy Renner. Same kind of interest. Who is this guy?

THR: But Jim, you must have known you'd have an easier time interesting a massive audience in "Avatar" if you'd put a major star in the lead role.

Cameron: We figured we were going to be spending so much on the effects that there wasn't going to be a whole lot of coin left when you turn the bag upside down to hire a $20 million actor. And I think the studio felt the same way. I'm comfortable working with unknowns or relative unknowns and making my own judgments on whether they're the right people for the roles. The only real stars I've worked with were Sigourney (Weaver) and Arnold (Schwarzenegger), if you think about it. I worked with Arnold three times but the first time he wasn't a movie star yet. He's a friend and Sigourney's a friend, so I feel very comfortable working with them. For me to work with a star, it's not something I wouldn't consider, but I'd have to do my due diligence, find out what they're like, get to know them. Find out if we can be eye-to-eye.

THR: The director Renoir made a lot of films and then stopped to write novels. Is there anything you'd consider doing instead of directing?

Tarantino: I intend to quit at 60. And I'm going to do exactly what he did. I'm going to write novels and cinema literature, stuff like that.

Bigelow: You have a plan?

Daniels: And he's very serious about it.

Tarantino: Well, she brought up exactly what I plan to do.

Cameron: I want to die directing. But I took my hiatus already because I figured I can still be directing when I'm 80 but I can't be doing the deep ocean expeditions, riding around in a zodiac on a 20-foot sea when I'm 80, I'll break my neck.

Tarantino: I would add more to that. If it actually gets to the place where you can't show 35mm film in theaters any more and everything is digital projection, I won't even make it to 60.

Cameron: Oh. Nobody's told you? (Reaches out hand.)

Tarantino: It hasn't happened yet!

Reitman: Let's not turn this into a fight.

Jackson: It's coming down the pike pretty quickly, Quentin.

Tarantino: Well, maybe I've got one more.

Daniels: I'd like to teach acting in the Bronx.

Reitman: If I couldn't direct I don't know what I'd do. I'd want to tell stories in one way or another, whether it was just convincing people to listen to me or whether I became I writer. I can't help but feel that's what I was put on Earth to do. I was scared of the idea of becoming a director and I went to college and I went premed. Because I was very familiar with the idea of how people perceived the children of famous filmmakers. If you were the son of a famous director, most likely you were a talentless spoiled brat with an alcohol or drug problem to boot. Why enter a profession where that was the going idea of me? I went and I thought, "I'll be a doctor, no one questions why you become a doctor." And my father took me aside and said, "Being scared is no reason to do anything." He told me to follow my heart and become a storyteller, and I realized in that moment that my entire life, all I've wanted to do was tell stories. So I really don't have an answer to your question. Because it seems like dying.

Bigelow: I always want to make films. I think of it as a great opportunity to comment on the world in which we live. Perhaps just because I just came off the "Hurt Locker" and I'm thinking of the war and I think it's a deplorable situation. It's a great medium in which to speak about that. This is a war that cannot be won, why are we sending troops over there? Well, the only medium I have, the only opportunity I have, is to use film. There will always be issues I care about.

Jackson: There's one area of directing that I'd love to improve upon. I tend to get involved in big movies that take two or three years of your life and I see what Clint Eastwood does and what Ridley Scott does, and they're able to do those films and also mix it up with these in-n-out, seven- or eight-month (films). I think that's a real skill and talent. I'd love to learn how to do that. So not everything took three years for one project. I'd love to reinvent the way I work, to some degree.