Shooting a film with seven to eight actors together is complicated sometimes because you have to cover everybody.
Every time I make a movie I have too many characters and too many locations.
Kenya doesn't have much of an infrastructure for hosting a film of this scale. Our producer decided that for the film to really work it had to be in Kenya.
Usually we have pick-up shots to film after all the main work is done; sometimes we even do them after our wrap party. Just like when you're packing up and moving, it's the little things that end up taking the most time, and there is no romance in the clean up.
I think I was, like, 23 or something [on The Breakfast Club]. I was the oldest of the five. Emilio [Estevez] and Ally [Sheedy] were a year younger. The only real difference was that Molly [ Ringwald] and Michael [Hall] still had to go to school. They could shoot, like, a half day. So a lot of my close coverage was done with Molly's stand-in, so Molly could do her schoolwork.
When you're a film-maker, sometimes you have to be a slave to continuity.
When we shot 'The Lord of the Rings,' we had special permission to film in wild areas of New Zealand that could be accessed only by helicopter. They would drop us off and we would work all day, and they'd pick us up and take us out again.
You were up at 5 o'clock in the morning, and then you'd ride in a caravan, because we didn't have big movie trucks or trailers that is the hardware of a movie camp.
When you do movies on low budgets, you don't want to have a location that requires a very big light right outside the window when you're 10 stories up. You have to find a location where you have a terrace outside, or you can light from a second floor, or you can light through the windows for daylight.
I shoot reality-based movies, and in actual locations, shooting them with a star is next to impossible.
Perhaps the most difficult thing is shooting scenes set 6,000 feet up in the mountains of Mexico.
In a movie, you have to be mindful that no budget is going to be able to deal with running around the globe at every whim of the writer.
In England when you make a movie even the weather is against you. In Hollywood the weatherman gets a shooting schedule from all the major studios and then figures out where he can fit in a little rain without upsetting Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer too much.
There's no way you can shoot low-budget stuff on lots of locations. It's just a practicality thing because every time you move, it costs time and money.
Movie logistics never really allow you to do anything but shoot the way the budget dictates.
The logistics of blood is something that I didn't even understood as a first-time director. Not just actors and make-up, but once a set gets bloody, you don't un-blood it. Once something gets bloody, you either rebuild the set, or you just don't get the shot.
You didn't have to go on location if you could just shoot down City Hall, LA.
If you're doing movies on a set... many times, I've shot the end of a movie in the first week of shooting. Because of locations or budgets or actors' availability.
For 'Vikings,' we have to do so much outside shooting, and it's normally - I think with American shows, it'll be 60 or 70 percent inside and a little bit outside, but with us, it's almost 70 percent outside, and that's huge and really difficult.
If you're filming a scene on horseback, if you're trying to control an animal that's much larger than you and trying to get it to do the exact same thing so you can match things up, that can get tricky, especially if the horse gets tired or angry or something.
There are so many factors that go into directing. It's honestly a logistical nightmare for a lead to direct themselves in an episode.
What I look for these days is that I don't have long speeches, the characters gets to sit down a lot, I don't have to learn any foreign languages, and it doesn't shoot in Minneapolis in February. That's mainly what I look for.
A movie script more than anything else is a plan of action for the crew. Everybody in the crew looks at the script to see what they're going to do. It has to contain where you are, and how many people are there, and what they do, and what time of day it is, and what time of year it is.
One of the terrible things about doing movies is that the writers never consider the temperature outside.
If you have someone falling out of the boat, you'd have to drag the boat up the river and film the same scene ten times, every time, dragging the boat exactly where it was up the river.
