What's nice about a lot of Wes Anderson's films is that there's a patience to it. I think that patience brings out a lot more funny things that you would miss otherwise if you just had to make quick cuts and keep the pace, whatever that pace is that bigger budget comedies have to have.
You need a pulse in a film. If I see a film that doesn't have rhythm, it's like listening to music that doesn't have rhythm; it doesn't really work.
The one thing I did know - because I've seen many, many of the road trip movies that everyone thinks about - is that death to a road trip movie happens when you spend too much time in the car.
I always feel on film you have to earn a ballad, because it's a different kind of pace.
In editing, it's amazing how you choose the in and out points. What you cut on is everything for creating tension. It's amazing how expanding a shot by five seconds can just ruin the tension.
I've worked with directors who have done it too much, particularly in television, you know, 'okay we got it, let's move on, next setup.' 'Well what about, we could maybe investigate?' 'Mmm… no, let's go.'
3D doesn't work quite so well with quick cuts and I probably would have done some longer takes had I really taken that information onboard.
I get bored with establishing shots of people getting out of cars and walking into buildings, getting into elevators and then 45 seconds later they have a line.
In my experience, very few people walk out of a movie. You have them for two hours, and you're free to explain or not explain whatever you see fit.
My father's films are often very slow for the modern audiences, which are used to a lot of editing. It's the audience that watches the film instead of the director dictating the reaction he wants from you.
The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness, But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb.
The film [Stalker] needs to be slower and duller at the start so that the viewers who walked into the wrong theatre have time to leave before the main action starts.
When you're in a movie with an audience, you can feel where a film is dragging. People start to move. They fidget. You need that perspective. To give it a cold eye.
I'm a big fan of being able to hold those long shots and use space. I don't know, I think everything's so quick cut these days, as if films are too afraid that the audience is going to get bored instead of relaxing and trusting their work.
'Eight-Legged Freaks' runs out of gas scarily fast - its one-joke premise lends itself more to a short than a feature.
I would have to say movies are my favorite. I love doing TV, too, but it's always rush, rush, rush. With a feature film, those moments and scenes get a chance to breathe, because you don't have to accomplish as much in one day.
There's no real rules about what you do [while directing]; it's just you just use your instincts as to the pacing of a film and what is repetitive and what is the minimum amount you can get away with to tell the story, that scene didn't make it in.
One of the challenges assembling the film was that gun fight went on for three and a half hours and we obviously couldn't spend three and a half hours of the film with one gun fight. It was trying to figure out the balance of how much an audience could take before they either became repulsed or desensitized or bored or just overwhelmed.
When we were trying to get the money for Driving Miss Daisy, everyone kept saying no one could direct it well enough to entertain an audience for 100 minutes essentially watching three people chatting in the kitchen.
If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.
I like finding a great shot and then just staying with it for a long time, not trying to pump things up with some kind of artificial energy by cutting.
The pacing in Tamil and Telugu is very different from Malayalam cinema.
Test audiences are notorious for getting kind of itchy when people talk too much, and you have to trust your instincts that they don't necessarily understand that you're not digesting the movie on a scene-by-scene basis.
Some people would find just the rhythm of my films alone to be a nightmare; they'd probably just fall asleep because they want something quicker. Other people fall into it and it works for them like a dream.
I hate movies that take a long time to shoot or directors that labor over every shot or do excessive amounts of coverage and excessive takes and don't keep things moving or constantly cutting.
