Posted by Vincent at bg-tc-ppp571.monmouth.com on November 05, 2000 at 14:52:22:
In Reply to: APB question for Vincent... posted by RugMuncher on November 04, 2000 at 12:31:41:
The easiest answer to this I guess is I was kind of going for a feel of "terrible things happen in beautiful places". That's kind of vague I know, but honestly, I think if I had put more thought into it beyond that it wold have ended up being quite pretentious. I simple choose locations i thought would look really great on film within which to set the scenes, and when we got there magic would happen sometimes- i.e., discovering the velvet ants and the butterfly landing on Todd's shoulder. I remember early on Kevin was trying to convince me to shoot in 16mm black-and-white, and I was pushing very hard for Super-16 color, and finally we met in the middle and I went with 16mm color. His argument was that black-and-white would fit the bleak nature, whereas I thought that would be too on-the-nose. I just didn't want to be so obvious with everything. It's kind of like Dario rgento's TENEBRAE- it's a slasher film that almost entirely takes place in daylight (it has this amazing murder sequence where John Saxon gets stabbed to death in the middle of a heavily populated square in Rome in broad daylight and nobody sees it happen)- even the night scenes are very brightly lit. I liked that a lot- it went against the grain and was more realistic, because I doubt that most evil people wait until dark to commit their dark deeds, and most tragedies don't conveniently wait for night and/or decrepit locations to happen. Another point re: overintellectualizing the "beautiful look" before hand (as opposed to letting things organically happen on set)- have you seen GEORGE WASHINGTON yet? I as really looking forward to this since i'd kept reading about how it was "inspired" by Terrence Mallick, and it won awards in Berlin and Toronto, and I went to see it... and damn near fell asleep. It was just so vague- it seemed to be REACHING for something but doing so in such an obscure manner that it just left me cold. Yeah, it looked really nice, and some sequences achieved a certain level of poetry, but in te end it just fell flat for me. Plus, it wasn't "inspired" by Mallick- it was tyring to BE Mallick. That kind of annoyed me. In the end, it just made me want to go watch DAYS OF HEAVEN again. I've since read a couple of interviews with the director, and it seems like he put a wee bit too much thought into the film, and it sows- it does't feel organic, it doesn;t suck you in like good poetry should. It would't want that to happen with A BETTER PLACE, so rather than put tons of thought into the "significance" of locations, I rather let the scenes play out in those locations and let the locations sort of work their magic on their own without me "imposing" anything on them, and in the end I think it worked out well.
Vincent
: During alot of your cut scenes, you used very colorfull shots of tree's, leaves, sky, and water. While the colors themselves brought life to the screen, was there another reason for the close-up shots of leaves blowing in the wind, almost as to say dispite all that is going wrong with Barrent and Ryan's lives, there is always something bigger going on, or prettier than the gloom and doom of thier lives if we just open our eyes?
: Or am I still in an Absolut vodka haze from 509?
: Just curious...
: RugMuncher
: .. waking up next to her, there was nothing wrong with the world each morning ..